


Criminal

by AirStank



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Age Difference, Angst, Desk Sex, F/M, Infidelity, Manipulation, Mind Games, Minor Character Death, Non-Consensual Bondage, Oral Sex, Rape/Non-con Elements, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 17:33:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13253187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AirStank/pseuds/AirStank
Summary: She's gonna be the ruin of Officer Gomez.Black Widow Lone Wanderer seduces Mr. Gomez for mysterious reasons. The DeLoria's are involved.





	1. Criminal

**Author's Note:**

> There is no underage sexual content in this story. However, if the idea of a Lolita-esque character bothers you, please do not read. If a significant age difference bothers you, do not read. **The non-con content is in the second chapter**. Thank you. :)
> 
> This was written for a Gomez/LW prompt on the Falloutkinkmeme back when it was still alive. Thought I'd post it here. :)

12:37 pm, Wednesday. Diner should get busy in a moment or so, kids’ll get out of class for lunch. 

Wait, was that the day? Wednesday already?

Herman glances over his shoulder, squinting under the fluorescents to study the calendar behind his desk. Yup, Wednesday—he knew because tomorrow he had to go see the Doc about Freddie. The first Thursday of every month; ‘a check-up’ is what he told the other Officers. 

He exhales deeply, staring at the circled date on the calendar as he taps his cleanly cut nails against the porcelain of his coffee cup. He wonders if Freddie will be at the diner with that girl—Doc’s kid. What was it, 4 months ago, that Herman finally squeezed the truth out of his son?

_I love her, Dad. She’s great… She makes me feel…_

Happy. Something Freddie hasn’t been in years. Good start.

_Wow. That’s super, pal. Yeah, nice girl—she’s a pretty one, son._

_Yeah, I know._

_She feels the same way?_

_Oh. Dunno. I haven’t told her._

“Hey, John?” Herman pushes up from his desk, downing the last of his cold coffee and lifting the cup to his fellow Officer. “I’ll take the diner today—you want a refill?”

Kendall shrugs dismissively, barely looking over his shoulder before he’s turning back to his terminal. “Whatever’s left over.”

It isn’t that long of a walk before Herman’s entering the diner at a lazed pace, brushing past a giggling young couple who don’t have enough time away from one another to notice the Vault Officer they bump into on their way out. 

That kind of stuff—lovesick teenagers, that is—usually makes Herman question what his son and the Doc’s kid do… alone. Would she even…? He’s heard rumors about John Kendall’s girl, geez, but nothing about Kate—that was her name, right? 

When Herman thinks of the Doc’s kid, he thinks of James: good, kind… _good_. Good girls like that usually stay that way… till’ marriage. 

Sounds like Pepper.

Herman snorts under his breath, thinking on a time when he was desperate like Freddie. When he loved girls so much it burned him and kept his body humming like jumper cables—he always needed to be on his feet, chasing Pepper, making her laugh and blush; anything to see that little spread of rose along a collarbone, beneath the teeth of a subtly unzipped vault-suit collar… 

He wonders now, as he stands at the coffee machine, if maybe Freddie got the worst end from both parents.

Herman’s OCD, his hope, his aching heart—he never was too bright with school stuff either. And, of course, Pepper’s fits, her anxiety and unhappiness. Poor kid’s taking life pretty hard; his down-times are almost as bad as Pep’s—not quite, though. Thankfully.

“Hey, Freddie look!” Herman blinks, turning slightly at the waist and looking over his cup to see his son being dragged along behind a familiar dark-haired girl, a smile so big on her face that Herman has to blink once more. Doc’s kid. Kate. “Good Afternoon Officer Gomez!”

Herman swallows a hard lump at seeing the brimming desperation in his son’s eyes as Freddie flushes a dark red, an expression on his face that is often mirrored in his wife’s breakdowns. “Kate, lets uh… Lets just umm… go—,”  
Maybe taking the diner today wasn’t a great idea… Freddie _has_ been pretty down lately and having his dad, the Vault Security Officer, here might ruin something with the Doc’s kid and… Shit.

“Morning kids! Thought I’d fill ‘er up, get my daily fuel.” Herman chuckles lamely as he lifts his cup up in reference, nearly apologizing out loud upon seeing Freddie ducking down into his vault suit-collar. Doc’s kid just keeps on beaming up at Herman though, releasing her clawed grip on his son’s arm to cross her own over her chest. “How’s class going? Learn anything?”

“Sure.” She laughs, a sound that brings a smile to Herman’s lips without much effort. Seeing them together is cute, he thinks. Freddie’s a handsome kid, and this Kate girl looks like… well, like what he’s seen in the one picture of her mother that Doc keeps on his desk. Broad mouth with prominent white teeth, pert nose, and sparkling eyes that are a bit too big for her face. Like her laugh, she’s bright and happy looking—Herman thinks that’s what Freddie must love the most. “Say, Mr. Gomez! That reminds me… Freddie and I were actually wondering…”

Freddie nearly chokes then, shaking his head earnestly while she keeps chirping on. “Kate, let me—,”

“ _Wondering_ ,” She lays heavy emphasis on the word. “If we might have a study night on Friday at the Gomez residence? I was going to proof-read his book report before he turned it in on Monday—,”

“ _This_ Friday?” Herman looks to his son, whose eyes quickly dart out of sight to stare at his shoes. The Friday’s after Freddie’s appointments are… the most uncomfortable days for Fred. A day after Doc’s sympathetic eyes and soft words, day after he’s excused from school early in front of the entire class for a ‘check-up’, a day after he’s been told he ‘has to _want_ to get better’.

“I mean, I wouldn’t even have to eat dinner if that’s too much! I could leave whenever you’d like me to.” She talks like she’s bargaining for something, as if she were already convinced that this was some outrageous request that needed heavy persuasion. 

Herman finds himself staring at Freddie suspiciously, wondering just _what_ exactly he tells his friends about his home life. Or maybe this girl is just… this way. Maybe she knows these first Friday’s are the hardest for Freddie, and is trying to force him to push past it. 

He _has_ heard that the Doc’s kid is a bit of an overachiever—a bit of a busybody, really.

“Well, I’d have to ask Pepper…” He pauses upon looking to Kate, thrown off by the look she’s giving him. Loaded, deliberate—like she knows something about him, something like she watched him undress last night before getting into the shower, saw a birthmark or a freckle. Something like knowing what he sounds like when he…

Wait. _What_?

Herman blinks at her, lost for a moment when taking his gaze from her disturbing eyes. He shakes his head. “I… Guess. Sure.”

She grins, a pretty sight, and does something strange. She hugs him—warmly, tightly, pressing her body into his as if she knew him that well. 

He almost squirms away from her, embarrassed and confused and ashamed, but there’s something about a hug from this girl that’s… wonderful. She’s soft and warm and small compared to him; and yet, the subtle strength of healthy muscles and tendons and the warmth of her is a rush of familiarity. Like jumper cables, like dark closets, like nearly stale bubblegum. 

And in a split moment, she’s gone. 

“Thanks Officer Gomez, sir! I’ll see you Friday!”

Kate’s grabbing Freddie again, towing him along towards a table where Amata is watching the whole interaction with a frown; but not before the Doc’s kid casts that same look over her shoulder, that horribly disconcerting sparkle in her large eyes that makes his fingers squeeze around his coffee cup.

* * *

She comes every Friday. 

Like a rush of stifling hot air she’s in the small apartment, sucking in the attention like an insect, oozing self assurance and draining the ease from his muscles. 

She’s everywhere at once; her boisterous laugh intoxicating the Gomez family and her large smile swallowing them up in their stunned state. It’s impossible to look anywhere else but _at her_ , even when Pepper mutters out the occasional conversational musing or Herman makes a lame joke. Everyone looks to Kate for her reaction—will she laugh? Will she go off on her own story? _Kate, Kate, Kate_.

Freddie’s crazy for her, following her about the house as if it weren’t even his, as if he were on a tour that he was afraid to get lost on. He isn’t doing any better in school, but that doesn’t prompt Herman or Pepper to speak up—Kate still helps him… _study_. 

Herman thinks that Pepper must feel comforted by the strength that Kate has, the way she smiles for no reason, the way her son looks at her when he thinks no one is looking.

Herman just loves Kate’s noise: her impossible laugh, her constantly fluctuating voice, her purposeful stomping. Everything about her is so obnoxious and consuming that he often loses sight of Pepper. His wife sinks into the grey walls, barely able to smile, unable to slouch in her seat or release her fingers from their grip in her lap. 

He doesn’t even look up now as Pepper and Freddie, mere mice in comparison to Kate—smaller, even—shuffle into the kitchen with piled dishes that clank with their unsteady grips. 

Kate looks across the table as soon as the door hisses shut, _straight at him_ , the heat still in her cheeks from her last burst of laughter and that same frightening look in her eyes that never fails to blank his mind. Her fingers curl like spiders’ legs from beneath her chin, red nails tapping at her lips, propping her strange face up into the light as the silence begins to darken and swell in the room around them.

Herman hates himself in that moment; hates the heat buzzing in his veins, hates the sparks in his fingers and toes. He wills himself to break her gaze, swallowing pathetically and fiddling with his fingers to ignore the urge to reach across the table to wipe the smudge of grease from the hollow beside her collarbone. 

_The grease. Talk about it._

“How’s workin’ with Stanley going?” Jesus, his voice nearly cracks from the nerves. From this too loud, too bright-eyed, too strange girl. “Aren’t you working on the Pip-boys nowadays?”

Her smile is slow in its growth, making him feel like he asked something endlessly stupid and she finds it endlessly adorable. 

Of course Freddie loves her; the kid’s a borderline masochist, apparently.

“I’m an _engineer_. Stanley isn’t my boss, you know.” She sloshes her orange juice about in her cup—it just reminds him of how off-putting it was that she wanted a breakfast drink at dinner time—and smiles at him from under a shadow of an expression. “And my work is going well, there is always something to fix in this tin can. Keeps me busy, hm?”

“I hear that.” Herman sighs, staring at the wine in his coffee mug. 

There are no more wine glasses. _I broke the last one the other day_ ; Pepper told him this a few minutes before Doc’s kid had arrived, her face flushed and her eyes watering with the rush to plate Kate’s perfect dinner: mashed potatoes—the ones from the box, ultra-rare steak, and carrots with the bloody juices from the steak poured over the whole thing like syrup. 

Herman had only nodded, nearly laughed, and poured 200 year old wine into a vault-issued coffee cup. 

“My knees are sure _sore_ , though…” 

Herman’s eyes shift up to her awaiting gaze, not nearly as taken aback by the heat in her eyes as he was the first time he saw it in the diner two months ago, but still a tad thrown off by the images growing in his mind.

_Just a kid, Herman, Jesus._

_Not really, turning 18 in two weeks._

_**Freddie’s girl**. Your son._

_Oh._

“Oh.” He says, swallowing uncomfortably once more and downing his wine in one go.

“Yeah,” She draws out the word, very obviously watching him. “Most days I feel like one of those dogs that you hear about in the books and such, y’ know what I mean?”

Herman blinks at her.  
“I’m always on all fours, trying to squeeze into those tight spaces.” She laughs lightly as her hands flutter about in explanation, like she isn’t pouring all of this horrible innuendo out into the air. “You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things this gal has to tinker with; stuff you wouldn’t even think existed!”

“Hah.” His voice finally cracks, privately piecing together ‘dog’ and ‘all fours’ and ‘style’. That was what O’Brian had called it, right? Dog-style? Dogged-style? “You oughta… um…”

“Hm?” She interrupts, catching his eye as she chastely licks leftover orange juice from the cleft just above her upper lip. 

“I was saying,” He pauses warily, glancing at the kitchen door as he hears Freddie groan loudly—the usual sound that follows ‘Do your chores.’ or ‘How is school?’. “You oughta talk to Wally Mack about borrowing some knee pads.”

It is her turn to draw a blank, though she manages to look confused in such a way that Herman feels idiotic and inadequate to the world. He nearly glares at her.

“He’s the uh… Well isn’t he the new couch for the Little League?”

“Yes.” She snorts in disgust, reminding Herman that Wally Mack isn’t very well liked by Freddie and Kate. “But what does that have to do with anything, Mr. Gomez?”

He curls his toes at the last note: _Mr. Gomez_. He likes the sound of it, or maybe the way she says it. Not like a teenage girl talking to her boyfriend’s dad, more like a young woman teasing a colleague. 

At this point, however, the whole conversation has been upended by his odd way of approaching social interactions—perhaps it’s the married man attempting to befuddle this girl’s strange fascination with him, before she becomes embarrassed by rejection. 

“Well, suppose you wore knee pads to your next fix-‘er-up,” He leans forward with a smile, his previous awkward manner lightening a tad as Freddie re-enters the room with a redness to his face that speaks frustration in it’s usual volumes. What a guy… “Don’t those ballplayers wear kneepads Freddie? Well, anyway, don’t you think that if you wore some, you could end a work day with less pain and… more gain!”

Freddie groans once more, leaning over to let his forehead fall against the table loudly. “Pop, come on!”

“What?” Herman frowns, attempting to make himself heard over Kate’s booming laugh. “I think that’s a great idea, what do you think Pep?”

Pepper blinks upon her address, touching a hand to her neck and letting her mouth bob open in confusion. 

“I think it’s marvelous.” Kate finally comes up for air, her face as red as her lipstick and her eyes watering. “Just swell, Mr. Gomez. Truly.”

“You think so?” Herman smiles back at her, raising his brow at Freddie. “See pal? She thinks so.”

“It’s just—!” Freddie looks to be about to bust a damn vein, he’s so busy whirling his head between his father and a giggling Kate that he doesn’t seem to be breathing too well. “Do you have to _talk_ like that dad?”

“Talk like _what_?” Herman sighs, watching with a touch of disappointment as Kate stands up in a flurry and straightens her vault suit with plucks and tugs. Most things get fixed around her and Herman finds himself growing dangerously accustomed to Pep’s momentary calm and Freddie’s beaming face. It’s all fleeting right before his eyes, though: Freddie is getting overtly flustered by his embarrassment and Pepper’s getting meek and grey again at his side, her eyes following Kate’s movements with exact precision. “I was just saying—,”

“Well!” Kate’s voice is thunder as she throws her hands up in dramatics. “I’m off! I promised my dad I’d help him with the auto-doc; try to get it up and running again and all that.” She turns to Freddie before he can protest. “You wanna walk me home?”  
“Oh—ah—um… Yeah, Katie, sure.” Freddie’s body almost collapses with defeat, his shoulders and head melting down into his body as he makes his way towards the door. 

“Kate!” Pepper blurts out, drawing the attention of the room. Herman holds his breath upon seeing his wife’s sudden change of expression—meek to near hysterical. She hates lots of attention all at once. “K-… Kate. Would you… like, the… well, the brownies—,”

“Ah! Yes!” Kate leans her head to the side, staring at his wife like she’s some sort of child. Herman grinds his teeth. “Thank you for reminding me!"

And then they’re alone again; Freddie’s back disappears behind the automatic door and Pep scurries off to dig up the brownies she ‘made’. Lucy Palmer dropped them by this morning…

Kate is back on him again as soon as the silence swallows them up, her odd eyes daring him to make a sound of protest as she makes her way around the table with slow, deliberate steps. 

She sits beside him, plopping down loudly into the seat where Pepper had sat previously. She’s close, too close for his comfort; the smallest brush of her arm touches at his bicep. 

With a movement too fast for him to deflect, her hand is on his knee, patting it lightly. 

“Hey!” He snaps out of reflex, tensing against her approaching face. 

Though she doesn’t kiss him like he had thought she would do—not on his lips at least. Herman’s back stiffens in alarm as Kate presses a warm, lingering kiss at the corner of his jaw, just beside his ear—the way her hand squeezes his knee in unison with the kiss makes a gasp hiss through his teeth.

“I like you.” She whispers. 

Her words are so juvenile, so strangely childish and familiar that a shiver runs down Herman’s back, his fingers digging into the chair beneath him. 

His wife isn’t in the kitchen, his son not waiting out in the hall just beyond the front door—he is here beside this girl, her lips brushing along his earlobe as she leans away from him, her heat leaving him like a sigh. 

He is 16 again, in a dark closet with Ellen DeLoria, fumbling with the zipper of her vault suit, trying not to laugh at her drunken giggling. 

Herman turns slowly to the seat next to him, where she once was. Kate is gone, smiling at his wife by the door with a plate of brownies tucked under her arm, backing out into the hall. 

Kate’s eyes, dark and loaded with challenge, are the last thing he sees of her before the door hisses shut.

* * *

She’s always on the edge of his thoughts.

His questions—all of them—are unending in their desperation and number; at his desk, on patrol, at dinner (when she isn’t sitting across the table from him, her socked toes brushing up and down his shin). He feels stupid and sluggish for not knowing what this girl is doing, for not understanding why he isn’t standing up for himself and his marriage. 

Nothing has happened, of course. No. She merely makes eyes at him when no one is looking, touches him chastely beneath tables and in passing glances. She is toying with him and that’s what he hates the most. _Because it’s working_.

He hates her deeply, for she knows that he is married, knows that he loves Pepper and his son with all his heart. She knows that Freddie is mad for _her_ ; Kate can see it as well as anyone on the outside can, no matter how much she deflects his weak advances. 

Yet she persists with Herman; Kate is _always_ there when his thoughts drift to her—in the diner, around the corner, passing by the Security office with Amata, that darkly lupine look in her eyes.

Herman wonders why. _Why_ this _good girl_ suddenly found an interest in him; a married and very much older man. He’s her father’s age, God damn it, and that only serves to spur her on more. 

He wants to burn the images of Kate from his head, the ones he has conjured for himself in darker moments. He wants to only see Pepper in his mind—like he used to not so many years ago. 

Now Pepper fades to grey even when beneath him at night, her breath in his ear and her body seething and pliant around him. 

Herman began to think about Kate in those times, about how much stamina resides in those muscles, of how she seems poured into her vault suit instead of stuffed in, of how her smile is real and huge and _happy_ …

He has followed her tonight, waiting until she left Freddie and Amata at the diner before falling in behind her through the winding vault halls—he began taking the night patrols in a desperate attempt to avoid her ever-watching eyes during the day. It doesn’t work for long; Pepper blabs about his change in shift over Kate’s 18th birthday dinner at the Doc’s apartment. 

Herman remembers Kate’s expression so clearly: the look in her eyes was so amused and heated and… predatory. They are the eyes he sees at night, when his wife is shivering beneath him. 

He momentarily loses sight of Kate when she takes an unexpected turn towards the stairs leading down to the… is she going towards the Storage Room?

There is a brief moment, as he is ducking under the door and punching in the lock-code, that he wonders what he is planning to do with her.

To finally take her like she has been leading him to do? He wants to, _desperately_ , to get the dirt and grime of her from his mind. 

To confront her? He should, he wants that too, because he is tired. _So_ tired of being confused and disgusted by the girl, by himself; of wondering what she wants from him and what will happen if he gives it to her.

To… Hurt her? He hates it, but yes, he wants that as well. She has hurt _him_ , too deeply to say, and she _will_ hurt Freddie. _His son_.  
Herman’s hands shake as he squints in the darkness, his skin seeming to ripple over his strained muscles from anxiety and fear and anger—he is too on edge, has been ever since the dinner she…—

… _can’t hear her footsteps any longer_.

“Officer Gomez?”

Herman nearly yelps from fright, spinning on his heel with his hand instinctually going to his nightstick. He cannot see, not at first, for the voice came from the back of the storage room. 

It’s her; he knew, of course. Her voice is distinct in its natural projection, in the rasp that makes his toes curl, in the constant underlying taunt in her tone.

He could just strangle her, throttle her, make her scream… He wants her, _all of her at once_ because it’s dark and hot in this damn storage room and he can see the challenge in her eyes from here, even as he stumbles on his way over to her.

“What brings you down here?” She asks casually, lowering what looks like… _A gun_? “Another change in shift?”

“I…” He’s a few paces in front of Kate, her face becoming clearer now that he’s closer to her pip-boy light. It’s hot, too hot for his uniform, and he can see that her cheeks are delightfully pink and her sweaty hair is pulled back into a ponytail. “You’re…”

“Oh, don’t mind _me_.” She sighs, turning from him dismissively with an air of what feels like haughty disappointment. She sets the gun—most likely a toy, from the sound of its light weight—on an empty crate, keeping her back to him as she strokes her fingers along the barrel. “I come down here all the time. I even kill a few radroaches every once and a while; keeps the vault safer in _my_ opinion.”

He frowns at her back before looking about the room, his mind too muddled to immediately find the targets directly across from his stance. They are weathered, very obviously abused by bullets frequently. He can tell even from his distance that she’s a crack-shot.

“That’s illegal, Kate.” He mumbles stupidly, turning to her as she inclines her head very slightly over her shoulder. 

“Mm.” She hums, a bit of rattling catching Herman off guard as she fiddles with her gun. 

“Is that a… BB-Gun?” He squints at the gun on the crate, studying the grinning cowboy branded into the stock. “Where’d you get that—?”

“There are other questions you’d rather ask.” She interrupts impatiently, whirling quickly on her heel until she’s facing him with accusing eyes, her back resting against the crates. “That’s why you followed me here, right?”

There is a flash of anger in him, cutting so deep that he nearly crosses the room and backhands her like the child she is. He pauses a few steps away from her, though, glaring into her insolent stare with restraint laced cautiously in his joints. 

“A few.” He replies quietly, enjoying the small shiver he sees run through her spine. 

They stare at one another for a moment, Kate chafing the rubber of her sneakers against one another in loud squeaks, Herman clenching and un-clenching his fists as he fights to pick the most appropriate question first. 

Instead he begins to feel stupid in his helmet. 

He yanks it off angrily, grunting in frustration when he forgets the buckles tucked under his chin, but it’s only a short pause in the removal before he lets it fall loudly to the ground. 

His hair is sweaty and out of style, so he messes it up further with furious hands, working his jaw as he watches her eyes follow his hands with interest. He feels his resolve break when he meets her eyes.

…Herman decides he doesn’t want to know much. At least, not right now.

“I just…” He mutters brokenly, for she can already see the decision in his eyes. “Why me?”

Kate looks up at him as he drags himself pathetically to her, the triumph burning so vividly in her eyes that he is nearly sick.  
Kate keeps him entranced with eyes that sparkle in the dark, helping him along the rest of the way to her awaiting body with a tug to his vest. She slowly pushes her knee up between his legs once he’s there and cocks her head to the side with a malevolent smile.

All at once her body is pressed to his, firm and soft and excessively hot in the stuffy storage room. He can see the sweat, _just there_ , in the dip above her upper lip. 

He leans forward as her hands slide up the sides of his neck, thin fingers plucking at his earlobes before they’re tangled in his hair. He closes in until their thickened breathing puffs against lips and noses, until his tongue is there in that sweet little cleft, cleaning the sweat away with a chaste, wet touch. 

“I want you.” She breathes out in a burst of hot air, as if she had been holding it in, and he nods deliriously, lifting her and placing her on the crate behind her in a hurried move. 

He isn’t sure who this man is, the one here in the storage room, kissing his son’s first love, cheating on his wife, betraying his friend and doctor. Herman was so quickly and wholly possessed by this girl’s presence that he didn’t have time enough to comprehend his destruction. He still cannot, not even now when still balancing on the brink of free-fall. 

It is too much though, for he is not allowing himself a thought in this moment; it is too risky. 

There is only Kate; the damp heat of her pressed against him deeply as she spreads her legs wantonly, grinding against him in breathtaking urgency. 

He nearly can’t take it, not this all at once so quickly. She must be vastly experienced or vastly inexperienced, for she moves her hips _just so_ that Herman’s hands rush to steady her movements, sinking his fingers into her waist in an attempt to still her. 

She doesn’t like that; her teeth bump against his purposefully in retaliation before they’re sinking into his lip, a small noise escaping from her throat that sounds vaguely threatening. 

His eyes begin to water from the sharp pain in his lip and the great urgency in his groin and panicky heart—it’s not enough, but it never will be. She has gone too far, pushed him too greatly, and now he can never be completely satisfied with what she can give him. Not truly. 

She’s too fast for him, too graceful and strong, he realizes. Kate slides down from the crate; her lips devouring him and making his muscles ache from the excitement. 

She claws at him, rips at the zipper of his vault suit, pushes him back against the crate with overt aggression, and utterly steals his breath away when she lowers herself to her knees in front of his opened suit. 

He nearly breaks down when he realizes that the bulky contraptions on her knees are, in fact, Little League knee pads.  
“Why me?” He asks once more with a shaken gasp, enraptured with the image of her tongue gliding along a prominent vein running up the side of his penis. 

The sounds she makes, wet and depraved and shameless, has his chest filling with fluttering and unstable air, has his arms shaking with the grip he has on the crate behind him. He hasn’t wanted someone so terribly since—

“I already told you.” She whispers around the bulk of him, taking a moment to smile humorlessly up at him before pulling his hips slowly towards her. Herman watches with a restless sort of groan as his cock, swollen and too hot and pulsing from excitement, sinks into her mouth until it disappears. 

_She’s done this before_ , he thinks faintly as his head falls back in bliss. With my son? With Wally Mack?

The fury that grovels sickly in his chest makes him thrust his hips forward sharply, pressing the tip of him against the back of her throat and making her cough and gag loudly. 

“You bastard…” Kate pants and blinks heavily as a murky tear runs a black line down her cheek. She opts to pump him with her hand as she catches her breath. 

Looking down at her, though, Herman can tell she isn’t offended. The opposite, actually; her eyes sparkle with admiration and heat for him, a genuine smile spreading across her shining lips as she wipes at her running eye-makeup.

It makes him want to vomit, to strike her, so he forces himself to look away from her as he wraps his hand over hers, guiding her towards his release. And it’s not long away; he’s been thinking about this for too long, wanting this and hating this. 

It’s barely two minutes of her working her mouth and hand over him that he comes, her name on his breath and his hands forcing her head down on his hips with two handfuls of her hair until she’s choking. 

Herman finds himself watching her as she carefully guides him through post-orgasmic shudders, her tongue caressing him in gentle circles and lips sucking in light, methodic pulses.

It doesn’t take him long to realize that she has been touching herself this entire time—his eyes travel in awe along the length of her arm until it disappears between her legs. 

“Let me.” He breathes—begs, really.

She doesn’t respond, doesn’t really move other than to rest the side of her face against his thigh. Her eyes, which are closed in delight, open suddenly in a devilishly languorous way to meet his—his breath hitches at the sight.

Herman grows impatient with her constant teasing, opting to yank her up to him by her shoulder. She yelps from the rough movement, wincing deeply in pain before she stomps on his foot in reprisal. 

It’s not much, but it still makes him grunt in discomfort before he’s yanking her back against his chest, molding her form to his and hugging his arms around her tightly to prevent her struggle. They fight for a moment, her snarling and scratching at him in her attempts to wiggle out of his grip. He holds her down well enough.

Kate lets her head fall back to his shoulder and arches her back into him, grinding her backside against him restlessly, shamelessly. 

“I’ll never forgive you.” He whispers in her ear as his fingers fumble with her suit’s zipper, clumsily forcing their way into her underwear. 

She laughs, the horrible thing; laughs and presses a searing kiss to that very same spot on his jaw where she began all of this. “You will.”  
Herman sinks a finger into her languidly, breathing deeply through his nose at the feel of her—not a virgin, obviously. Snug, though, and wondrously hot with her slick. 

Her response is weak, barely a whimper, and he adds another finger just to hear that sound again. “ _More, Sir_ …”

It feels like an awkward dance—almost: the way he has to move with her to keep her upright. She shakes against him, grinding and thrusting her hips against his fingers with enough vigor to make her pant—the eroticism makes his breathing come heavy as well, his breath stirring the baby-hairs framing her face. 

“Just there, _almost_ …!” She gasps just moments before he feels the tight contractions around his fingers, the muscles in her body going taut and her legs shaking until they buckle beneath her. 

He grunts at her sudden collapsed weight in his arms, awkwardly using his knee to aid his effort to keep her upright as she begins to shiver, whisper to him, groan in appreciation… it’s all sort of a blur, if he’s honest. 

Maybe it’s the final realization of what he’s just done, that this is all permanent and real and… he’s just done it. Herman thinks that the worst of this all is that he wants it again. Oh, God, does he want it again…

It takes him a moment to see her, really _see_ her, and when he does he realizes that she’s cleaning herself off with his undershirt before shimmying back into her cotton panties. Spotlessly white, of course.

Herman watches her, still labored of breath, still exposed with his vault suit opened and his undershorts yanked down his hip. 

She’s radiant in her youth, her amber skin flushed in post-coital, her hair haphazardly free from its formerly prim pony-tail, her dark eye-makeup smeared from sweat and emotionless tears. 

There is something attractive about this: her—the ruined visage of this star-student; seeing her filthy and disheveled, so unlike her true self, makes a strange swell of breath lift his chest. 

He begins to tuck himself back into his armor, struggling with shaking fingers on some of the latches before she’s there in front of him, working with quick flicks of her fingers, strapping him in securely.

And then Kate kisses him, a kiss that makes him nervous, makes his heart thump uncomfortably hard and precise against his ribcage. She tastes of him, bitter and salty, and it disgusts him—yet he still can’t help but grab greedy handfuls of her to pull her closer into the kiss. 

She pulls away in a breathless flurry of movement, her lips shining and deeply pink from his vigor. Kate’s got that sparkle in her eye, the one that enraptures him instantly—makes him wonder what she’ll do with him next. 

Kate is fast as she snatches her hand out to grasp him between his thighs, wrenching a horrified gasp from Herman as she grips his cock tightly through his vault suit—just firmly enough to rouse him once more after a few strokes. 

She burns her devilish eyes into his for a moment before she gives her lips a quick lick, leaning up towards his ear on her very tip toes.

“Give Pepper a _big kiss_ for me, eh Manny?” She whispers, and his heart breaks.

* * *

Kate pinches her cigarette tightly between her lips, eyes crossing to focus on pouring vodka into the water bottle emptied previously. She can feel the group waiting on her, impatient and wondering why she hasn’t got her father’s steady hands.

 _Give **us** some of the booze, Katie, Jesus_.

Fact is, she _does_ have dad’s precision—she just wants to see Christine cringe as she sloshes Daddy Kendall’s favorite breakfast drink over her fingers and lets it pool onto the floor beneath her.

“Katie, you don’t need that much.” Amata frowns at her as the party talk begins to pick back up, discussing jobs, relationships: bullshit. “Remember last time? How sick you were for so long? You have to be careful—,”

Kate takes a deep breath of cherry-flavored nicotine, setting down the vodka with blatant aggression. The sound of the bottle hitting the crate Kate sits on makes everyone jump, makes them look to Kate without doubt. 

_Outbursts are getting expected now, then_ …? She sighs in disappointment.

Kate meets Christine’s glare with an unflinching smile. “Whoops.”

“Are you listening?”

“’Course Amata, my world revolves around you.” Kate blows a smoke ring into Amata’s eyes with a sugary smile, drinking in her friend’s discomfort with something close to a self-satisfied leer. She takes a heavy swig of the burning liquid. “I need it tonight, I really do. Need to talk to _him_.”

Amata’s eyes narrow a fraction before she looks around the room, making sure no one is paying attention to the pair. No one does anymore, Kate wants to point out—not after they realized that Poindexter rides high on insults and jeers, and especially not after _Poindexter_ broke Paul Hannon’s arm with a lead pipe after he called Amata fat on her seventeenth birthday party.

Kate told dad it happened when he got his arm stuck in one of the vault-ventilation fans. Paul never contradicted her.

It’s Amata’s eighteenth today, just a few weeks after her own. The official business was done already as far as Kate was concerned—she and dad had a sufficiently awkward dinner with Amata and Mr. Almodovar earlier in the evening, and shortly after daddy-overseer went to sleep, Amata met with the rest of the class of ’76 in the storage room. 

Kate hated how fucked up it was to have all these sweaty, horny teenagers standing around waiting for her to put the key-code into the storage room door so they can get high on air fresheners and cheap pre-war cigarettes. 

See, only she and Paul knew the codes to the vault out of the whole class, and Paulie-boy was with Butch and the rest, lurking the halls and being fashionably late.

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself Katie.” Amata looks experimentally at Kate, following her large eyes to the door that hisses open for three leather clad figures. “You know he doesn’t _really_ care, right?”

Kate’s eyes lift to Amata’s casually, though the challenge that radiates there shuts her friend up quicker than she can bother to blink. 

“ _Okay_ , sorry.” Amata sighs. She pauses, looking up as the room’s conversation fluctuates in enthusiasm for the new arrivals, greetings and scoffs alike are exchanged. 

Butch’s eyes go straight for Kate, of course. 

Amata rolls her eyes. “Look, I don’t know why you two are on speaking terms again, but I know it can’t be good. You can’t let him manipulate you again, Katie, I mean it. Not after last time.”

“Huh?” Kate blinks as she is forced back into the conversation by Butch’s lapse in attention for her. She turns her eyes, intensely blue against the backdrop of grey vault walls, on Amata’s somber expression. “Oh. Fuck Butch.” 

Amata’s brow rises in such a precisely doubtful way that Kate can feel an itch in her palm to slap her friend as hard as she can— 

_No. Never with Amata; not with Amata or Dad. Never._

“I mean it, sweet-cheeks.” Kate mumbles around her cigarette, cocking her head to the side as her eyes follow Butch’s movements through the party with unwavering exactness. “No one manipulates me.”  
Kate waits until Butch will look at her once more, for he always does. Typical. He’s such a fucking dope that he just can’t help but do it when he’s hanging around Christine, glancing up from his heated flirtation to watch her reaction. 

Kate doesn’t give him one, just keeps her head weighted to one side as she blows smoke rings in his direction lazily. 

Only when he leers at her does she rise from a _familiar_ crate, giving it a knowing smirk over her shoulder, before she saunters towards the Tunnel Snakes.

“Hey Junior!” Kate’s tongue darts out to lick her lip habitually at the sight of Paul’s stiffening spine—damned if she can’t just smell the fear coming off him. “How’s the old branch? Still in a bit of a _bind_ , I see.”

Hannon turns from Butch and Wally to glare down at Kate, a wary swallow working his throat at the sight of the sparkle in her eye. 

He gives her a shrug, looking down meekly at his wrapped arm. “’S fine, Katie. What’d you care?”

“Oh, you know… Daddy said that arm would always be a bit stiff.” She sighs casually, taking a drag before blowing the acrid smoke in Paul’s face. “I was just wondering how you jerk off with a shit arm.”

“God, Kate!” Christine gasps, drawing the lazily amused stare of Kate straight on her. “Could you be more disgusting?”

“Could, probably.” She flashes Kendall a sour sneer, flicking cigarette ashes at the girl. 

“What do you want, Poindexter?” Wally interjects, obviously thinking that if he defends Kendall’s honor he’ll get his willy wet. Actually, he probably would, knowing dear Christine. 

“Butch.” Kate answers bluntly, making Wally blink. She turns her gaze onto the aforementioned, flashing him the loaded smile she knows drives him up the wall. “I got a secret for you, DeLoria.”

“Screw you.” Wally spits, shouldering in front of Christine to tower over Kate threateningly. “Ain’t you got Freddie the Freak to keep your _secrets_ company?”

Kate’s eyes light up as they meet Butch’s once again, her skin rippling in a pleasured shiver at the way his jaw tightens in anger. “Say, I guess you’re right Wally! Maybe I _should_ go tell him… What do you think _Butchie_?”

Butch flicks his cigarette to the floor, mashing it irritably with his boot before yanking Kate roughly by the arm towards the empty back generator room, leaving the rest of the room to watch their disappearing backs in tense silence.

* * *

_I’m, um, with Pepper now._

_**What?** _

_I’m sorry I—… I just…_

_…You’re such a fucker Herman, I can’t believe it sometimes._

_I know._

_You **know**?_

_Yeah._

_What about **me**? Hm? You think about me at all?_

_…_

_Fine. Just—fine. Why don’t you give Pepper a **big kiss** for me, eh Manny?_

 

“Well?” 

Herman blinks, looks up from his blank report and into burning blue. The black that is smeared elegantly around Kate’s eyes makes her look vaguely cat-like. 

Her smile, however, is eerily lupine. 

“Uh—hm?” He splutters out lamely, eyes darting between her gaze and her opened vault suit collar. He can see a swell of breast from beneath the white of her tank top, modest but firm. “What?”

“Hah. You remind me of someone, Manny.” She gives a short bark of laughter at her own horrible joke, pinching her cigarette between her fingers as she squints on a drag. “I’m wondering, _Officer_ , if I’m in trouble.”

“Oh.” He swallows, his blood thrumming and his heart jittering about in anxiety from this girl before him. 

Herman had been in the diner refilling his coffee earlier this evening when he got the staticky report that some kids were seen acting suspiciously around the storage room door. 

Usually an officer would just send Andy over to ruin the mood and force the kids to leave from fear of a malfunctioning Mr. Handy. Though it was always different after curfew, and especially since the kids seen entering the storage room had parents or relatives in the Security department. 

Herman had accompanied Officers O’Brian and Park to Storage, the collar on his armor tight and hot from memories of his last visit here. 

He hadn’t seen Kate much after… that encounter—she stopped coming over for dinners and study sessions after graduation. Pepper’s devastated, of course; she keeps trying to call Doc’s apartment for visits and smiles, for loud laughter and sparkling eyes. Herman stops her, of course. He doesn’t think he can handle being in the same room with Kate and Pepper. 

Herman knew before he’d even entered the key-code to the Storage room that the kids must be having their own private celebration for Amata’s birthday. He could hear the old—supposedly broken—jukebox playing softly amongst laughter and scattered chatter. 

Upon entering the room Herman instinctually scanned the gathering of suddenly panicked faces for Freddie’s. He wasn’t hard to find—he was making a big show of spitting out a beer in shock of seeing his father standing in the door way, the amber liquid spewing all over Peggy Wolfe’s leg beside him. 

It hadn’t taken long to clear the room with Park and O’Brian to help—they barked and shooed at the fleeing kids until one girl started crying for fear of arrest. 

Herman didn’t exactly approve of frightening the kids in order to lay down the law, especially not with the two Officer’s present doing the job. 

In fact, Herman seemed to recall a time when Officer Park had huffed nearly half a can of the vault’s hallucinogenic of choice, air freshener, at Pepper’s sixteenth birthday party. Long time ago, but the irony is still fresh in Herman’s mind. 

It was when the room was empty, save for Herman, that he heard it: a muffled giggle cut off by a choking gurgle, followed by the very distinct sound of a body hitting against the solid vault wall. 

He had realized then, with sudden clarity, that he hadn’t seen Kate or Butch amongst the group of the graduated class—even when Paul Hannon and Wally Mack had been seen bolting out before the rest of the crowd.  
It took but a moment to find them huddled behind a stack of crates, a dim glow of light from a dying fluorescent highlighting Butch’s bared teeth and Kate’s quickly reddening face. 

Butch had her pinned against the wall with his hand wrapped so tightly around her throat that Herman could see the whites of his knuckles. 

Herman had Butch slamming into a crate before he could think to speak, to call out to stop—maybe DeLoria would’ve if… no, he wouldn’t have—he’s just like his mother.

“What the _fuck_?” Butch cried, instinctually bucking and thrashing against the larger body that pushes and holds him down on the floor. “Get off me man!”

Herman couldn’t keep himself from forcing his knee into Butch’s spine, wrenching a huffed groan from the young man beneath him as Kate’s cough’s and gasps sounded behind him.

His anger seized, however, when Butch jerked his head back and fixed Herman with a look so coldly familiar that Herman’s heart skipped a beat. 

_Come on, Manny sweetheart, you ain’t messin’ with just **any** DeLoria…_

It hadn’t taken long to get Kate back to the Security office, merely telling Officer Park that he should escort Butch DeLoria to his apartment while Herman volunteered to walk the Doc’s kid home. No suspicion, just a simple nod—Herman nearly had a panic attack, anyway.  
“Yes, Kate, I think you are.” Herman replies, as firmly as he can manage, and begins to sharpen his pencil. He looks up briefly with a squint, trying to work out if her wild, dilated eyes are because of the late hour, alcohol, or drugs. “As far as I can tell, you’re under the influence, out after hours, and were in possession of alcohol when I found you.”

“Come on, vodka doesn’t _count_ Manny.” She swings her legs up onto the table between them, crossing her booted feet with a plucky bounce. “Neither does Fresh Pep, it’s technically a household appliance—,”

“ _Officer_ Gomez.” He corrects lamely, falling quiet when she looks up at him in surprise. 

“Oh cut the shit, _Manny_.” She sneers acidly, making him wince as he breaks the tip of his pencil on the first letter of her name on his report. 

In a quick move Kate leans across the table, snatching the pencil from his hands and slamming it into the table loudly. Herman jumps when it snaps in half. 

“Off the record, hm?” She smiles sweetly at him, the smoke curling from her mouth smelling like candy. “I’ll tell you _all_ my dirty secrets.”

The prospect gives him pause, his racing thoughts preventing him from flinching against the broken pencil splinters that Kate childishly throws at him. “Will you?”

She too seems to consider that offer for a moment, probably thinking of the ways she can weave him further into her grasp; she will never truly let him into her head, of course, even Herman’s slow mind can gather that. He can’t possibly imagine what she will say, however—if she will even answer his questions. Is this a game? Or is she trying to help him figure something out?

Watching her now, twirling a strand of hair around her finger with her eyes all but branding him, he can’t help but feel like he is missing something dire. 

“Tell me, Kate—anything.” He leans forward with the hushed plea, his eyes openly searching hers as cherry smoke burns his eyes. 

She laughs lightly, an unsettling trill that sends a spike of warmth to his heart, and rolls her ankle in a stretch. 

Kate’s eyes lift to his. “I’ve been a bad, bad girl…” 

Herman swallows as he holds her intense gaze, a shiver running through him as a drop of sweat tickles down his neck. 

She gives his entire being a once-over, nose scrunching in disgust as she flicks her ashes onto the floor. “I’ve been careless with a _delicate_ man.”

“Kate.” Herman warns, his visible anger drawing merriment to the darkness of her eyes. “You forget who you’re talking to, young lady.”

“Oh?” She challenges strongly, letting her feet fall loudly to the ground as she leans across the table as well. “What, you aren’t going to tell my daddy, are you?”

“Maybe I will.” He says, clenching his fists to keep from snatching her up by the hair and dragging her across the table. “That’s what you deserve.”

“Hm.” She smirks thoughtfully, large eyes flying about in their observation of his face. Herman wonders just how high she is. He can smell the chemicals on her breath. 

“Well Manny, if _you_ tell...” She pauses, fixing him with that familiar frightening stare as grey smoke swirls from her nostrils like an imp. “ _I’ll_ tell.”  
Herman swallows pathetically, his heart jumping irregularly in fear at the very idea. Pepper’s face, young and happy and in love, is suddenly in his mind.

“You’re disgusting.” He whispers, eyes staring into the nothingness beyond her as she slinks gracefully out of her seat to walk about the room thoughtfully. “Don’t you… care?”

“ _Care_?” She snorts. “About what? Care about _you_ , Manny old boy?”

“About your reputation.” He mumbles, fighting back the painfully sore lump in his throat and the overwhelming terror of what this young woman has done to his life, about what _he_ has done… “You’re stuck here, you know. You think you can live with the whole vault, your father and friends, judging you and hating you?”

Kate is silent, so sure in her step that Herman briefly thinks that she has left him. He goes to turn his head, though the heated breath puffing along his jaw from within the darkness behind him freezes his bones in their sockets. 

Instinctual fear prickles up his spine as he feels a sharp canine prick at his skin when she presses her lips to the shelf of his jaw.

“Ellen DeLoria manages…” She hisses, her tongue wet and seething against him. “Doesn’t she, _Manny_?” 

Shock jolts Herman heavily, his mouth bobbing open in confusion for a moment before he gasps out a breath of horror. His throat is tight, too tight, and he can see a different shade of blue eyes in his mind now—not Pepper’s lovely gray, not Kate’s brilliant sapphire...

Ellen DeLoria’s sky blue. Outraged, shamed, hateful sky blue.

“Mmm…” Kate purrs, running her hands down his chest from behind his back. “You seem _tense_ , Officer Gomez.”

Herman chokes on words that threaten to spill— _I didn’t mean to, I didn’t know what to do, I still care_. His heart palpitates in such thunderous, precise throbs that he feels light-headed and nauseous. He feels as weak and gray as Pepper, and suddenly he understands what it feels like to be crushed under a presence so malicious and gargantuan.

Kate kisses the corner of his open lips, her fingers walking themselves cheekily down the length of his vault-suit-zipper until she grasps a possessive handful of his groin. Herman gasps at the ready reaction from his body, almost instantaneous, and Kate groans in his ear at the feel of him. 

“Say, Mr. Gomez…” She muses in a hush, removing his security armor with one hand and boldly groping his awakening cock with the other. “I’ve been wondering about something…”

Herman sighs miserably as his hands begin to aid her in the removal of his uniform—he shuts his eyes as she slips her hand into his undershorts and begins to stroke his penis with a tightly wound fist. 

“Do you ever think of me when you’re fucking her?” She taunts in a breath laced with smoke.  
Images of strangling this girl until she’s blue and stiff flashes behind Herman’s closed eyes before he moves into action. Though he is not as fast as her, he is strong enough to have her body thrown onto the table with a slam so loud it nearly makes him wince. 

Her head must’ve hit the table in the process, for he can see the way her eyes roll about in a dazed state as she slumps, momentarily helpless, against the table before him. 

Herman’s heart aches in concern, though part of him _hopes_ she’s hurt—that she’ll show up on her father’s doorstep with a bruised face. 

He wastes no time in reaching beneath her to unzip her jumpsuit, ripping her tank-top when he catches the zipper clumsily on the white fabric. 

When she is stripped of her cotton white underwear he presses his erection flush against her backside, roughly grinding himself there as he leans over her body.

She is coming to, her pupils exploding from drugs and arousal as she looks up back at him. “Right here, then?”

Herman presses a kiss to her bare shoulder as he slowly presses himself against her wet heat, grunting out a strained breath as the head of his cock finally pushes through the tightness of her entrance. 

His sigh shudders from the feeling of her strength and youth, a tightness to her that he hasn’t felt since his younger days with Pepper. She is muscle and sin and heat around him, and he can’t help the way his forehead falls to rest between her shoulder blades.

“ _Oh_.” Is what she breathes when he slowly pushes himself further inside her. He leans back to watch the inches disappear, the very image making his cock throb with each thundering beat of his heart. 

“Hold still.” He rasps, his hands flying desperately to steady her jumping hips. Herman holds her down into the table, pushing his hips forward until the tip of him is pressed against her cervix.

“Oh _God_ …” She whines into her folded arms, her powerful thighs managing to fold around his hips to press her heels into his backside until she is hissing in pain from the pressure of his cock. “You’re in my fucking _stomach_ , Manny.”

He growls lowly in concentration, holding her hips in place as he pulls himself slowly out of the tight heat of her before thrusting lazily back in.

* * *

“How are you feeling, Officer Gomez?”

Herman shrugs, tapping at the Vault bobblehead grinning up at him, before smiling mildly at the Doc across from him. 

“Thought this was about Freddie.”

“Of course it is, do not worry Officer.” James smiles in return, genuine and handsome. “Freddie is doing well, Chlorpromazine usually works, though only to an extent, in my opinion—I’m glad that he has found his own happiness outside of his medication.”

Herman nods absently, seeing too much familiarity in the dark blue eyes that stare kindly at him. He stares at his worrying hands. “Call me Herman, please Doc.”

“Well Herman,” James relaxes back in his seat, motioning to the chair opposite his own; Herman sits down with a graceless plop. “While I know it’s none of my business, it has simply come to my attention that, over the past few meetings with your son, _you_ have seemed…”

Herman waits patiently, eyes darting nervously to a picture of the Doc’s wife—Kate’s mom; she looks so much like her that a prickle of sharp, seething shame licks along his skin.

“Nervous.”

“Huh?” He blinks into the doctor’s steady gaze. “Oh. Really? I guess it’s the change in shift. I, um, haven’t adjusted yet…”

“Sleeping problems then?” James nods thoughtfully. “Well Herman, if this was an official check-up, I would advise that you arrange for a change in shift. Or, conversely, I could prescribe you—,”

“No.” Herman says a little too forcefully to go unnoticed. “No, I’m—Gosh… Sorry Doc. I just don’t want my entire family on pills, you know?”

James has a weary, knowing look in his eyes and they crinkle around the edges sympathetically as he smiles. “Of course, that’s understandable my friend.”

The two men are silent for a moment—the clock on the wall seeming to echo in the small office—before the sounds of animated chatter coming from the clinic outside draws James’ attention to the window beside him. 

Herman would know that loud, boisterous laugh anywhere, and he nearly yelps out loud at the realization before remembering just who he is sitting with.

 _Jesus_ …

Kate doesn’t quite burst into the room with her usual theatric way—she simply peaks her head in, flicking at a curl that has escaped from the garish red bandana tied about her head.

“Hey Daddy.” She whispers apologetically, oddly calm and polite, before smiling without a hint of her usual mischief straight at Herman. “Good Afternoon Officer Gomez. I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“No, honey, we were just finishing.” James absolutely beams at his daughter, the expression so very like her own smile that Herman nearly forgets to breathe. “You’re right on time, actually.”

James turns to Herman with a good-natured shrug. “I’m hopeless with my terminal, you see.”  
“Oh?” Herman snaps out of his racing, terrified thoughts as Kate prances into the room with loud, graceful stomps. She kisses her father chastely, admiration glittering in her eyes, before she begins her work with a forceful punch to the chassis. “Um, ah. Me too.”

“ _Ingenious_ doctor, they say…” Kate teases, biting on her tongue as she concentrates. “What if the _terminal_ suffers a heart-attack?”

“Well that’s what you’re here for, dear one.” James pats her bent spine as she leans over the computer, then standing up and holding his hand out to Herman pointedly.

They shake hands. “Thanks Doc, for… you know, everything.”

“Don’t thank me, Herman. I care for Freddie and your family; you’ve done a lot for me and my girl.”

Herman blinks, swallows pathetically, and manages to catch the small spark in Kate’s eyes. 

She has no idea how true that is; how much Herman fought for the strange family nearly 19 years ago. “Um, yeah. Of course. I’ll see you next month?”

“Oh, Officer Gomez!” Kate pipes up, yanking roughly at a wire in her grip before plugging a different one into a colorful slot behind the terminal’s monitor. “The Overseer wants me to have a look at the security cameras around the Vault; he said I’d need an Officer to help me find them. Would you mind?”

“Catherine.” James frowns half-heartedly. “It’s late.”

Catherine. Kate. _Oh_.

“Dad,” Kate whines around the screwdriver gripped between her teeth. Herman eyes the sharp canines that peek over the colorful handle. “ _Don’t even_ suggest that I ask Stevie Mack.”

“Well—,”

“It’s alright, Doc.” Herman clears his throat, drawing twin pairs of blue eyes. “I was about to go out on shift, actually. It’d be nice to have some company.”

“ _See_?” She asks, voice muffled before she takes her tool in hand to refasten the frame of the machine back together. “ _I’m_ nice company; don’t you think so Officer Gomez?”

“Of course,” James scoffs instantly, _thankfully_ , before shaking his head. He doesn’t even notice Herman’s pained swallow. “If not a little loud-mouthed, perhaps?”

“Oh, _really_?”

They joke and beam at one another—happily, jovially and lovingly. A father and a daughter, both beautiful and brilliant and radiant people, still as mysterious and exotic as the day they stepped into the Vault. How typical they seem now, acting the perfect pair—like a family straight out of a pre-war movie.

A rare love shines behind James’ eyes upon Kate’s loud cackle; Herman turns from the sight.

* * *

Some days Herman thinks he will confess to someone—Pep, Freddie, maybe even Kendall. The worry begins to whisper to him, attempting to coax him and frighten him into trying to end the relationship with her. Kate’s voice is always stronger though, her touch always hot and tangible in moments of doubt—he barely goes a week without her taste fresh on his tongue, now. 

And now, with his back thumping against the wall of the inner storage room chamber—Katie’s favorite haunt for such things—he can’t help but pant and fumble and blush right along with her as they tug at zippers and buttons. Because he’s young again, happy and oblivious to complaints of bland tasting pills and suffocating walls, to Pep’s worried glances and Freddie’s heart-heavy sighs. 

Yes, she is still horrible to him—slapping him, using him roughly, hissing insults so acidic he will still feel the burn for weeks—but there is just… _something_ about Kate. He suspects it’s what her father sees, what Freddie sees, Amata too, even. There is a spark in her darkness, a speck of light that makes him grovel to reach it; to see a shine of regret in her merciless eyes.

When Kate is gone from his side, however—warmth and laughter and snarling smiles gone and long settled—Herman feels sick. Her very being makes him want to vomit, want to throttle her and kill her and take away that knowing glint in her eye. She alone has taken away his marriage, however cracked it was, and has broken it into irrevocably jagged pieces. He would always have Kate’s taste on the back of his tongue, even if Pep never did taste it. 

But now, _oh now_ , when Kate is curling around his body with strong limbs and blinding heat, he can’t possibly adore her more; her quick, observing eyes, terrifying in their intelligence and strength, pinning his breath in the depths of his lungs.

She is so strange looking without her dark eye-makeup, he realizes—not as pretty perhaps, though maybe a tad more delicate looking. Her impossible eyes stare up into his now, large and crackling with carefully leashed malice.

“How is your hair curly one day,” He whispers against her temple, wrapping a ringlet around his finger thoughtfully. “And completely straight the next?”

“Magic.” She hums, forcing her hand a bit too enthusiastically into his groin in a show of her absolute authority over him. He grunts, though doesn’t dare reprimand her—his memory isn’t so bad as to forget the last time he tried to resist her wild methods to get him hard. “And a bit of heat, bit of steam, bit of pressure, bit of _mashing_ and _pulling_ …”

“Kate… _Kate_ wait—!” He gasps out desperately, wincing at the harsh way she attempts to rouse him. 

It’s like this most days, he can admit. Sometimes she really _is_ too young and fast; too eager to have him in any way she can. He realized very early on that while she wasn’t a virgin, she also wasn’t as experienced as he had initially assumed. Or, perhaps, whatever boy she’d had before Herman had been much more accustomed to pain. 

He could imagine tolerating such raw, forceful passion at a younger age, when sex and fondling usually lasted a few minutes as opposed to hours. In fact, she often praised him in something akin to honest-to-goodness admiration of what he could make her feel over a course of an hour or two.

Kate was filthy, however, in what she would spit and growl at him when he fucked her. It was something he hadn’t experienced since his days with Ellen DeLoria, and he had discovered more than once that such things had been sorely missed. The slice of red-painted nails, the stickiness of lingering lipstick, the rousing, warm smell of feminine youth, heated like a furnace and jumping like a livewire. 

There isn’t much foreplay, now, before Herman’s shaking with the need to have her bare against him, to fill her up just like she’s begging him to. He pulls and tugs pointedly at her work-suit, sealing his lips momentarily over a smudge of grease on her cheek.

It tastes nearly as soiled as she is, and Herman keeps that thought in mind as he is spurred on by ghosts of memories; closing his eyes and thinking of an earlier time, a hint of vodka and bubblegum and deep sky blue.  
It’s an hour or so later, lying on one of the many mattresses she has planted through-out the vault for late night jobs—a habit he found cute while also being equally convenient—that he slips up. 

While he is no mastermind like she, Herman has managed to train himself into keeping emotions and hurts to himself. If he were to truly lay out his worries and fears before this girl, she would rip and tear at them until they were gaping, festering wounds. 

Though it’s now, warm and sweaty and lulled by the sound of vibrating gears and whirring machinery, that Herman let’s his biggest hurt go: he tells her that he loves her. 

Kate’s body is a ripple of stiffening muscles upon the low rumble he emits, three words that sound half-hearted and weak from an overly strong orgasm minutes earlier. 

He wishes it hadn’t slipped, that she had been asleep when he’d confessed. Even Herman didn’t truly believe that he loved her, though it was close enough to what he truly _did_ feel that… well, he couldn’t just let her think that this wasn’t intensifying for him. 

Every time he saw her he felt another part of him breaking. 

She finally moves, raking her fingernails pleasantly, _gently_ , through the dark hair at his chest. Kate shifts on top of him, pealing her sweaty cheek from his stomach to stare up at him in an astounding show of pure, untainted curiosity. 

Kate’s face devoid of spite is breathtaking, quite literally, for Herman holds his breath as he observes the girl before him.

She looks equal parts exhausted and delicate—deep running circles gaunt her eyes, eyes that shine dully with giant, almost inhuman pupils. Her lips are bitten and swollen, throbbing a deep pink in the soft swell of light shining from behind Herman, where a machine purrs ever wakeful. Her hair is wild with curls, a drop of his semen clinging to the end of a shining ringlet. 

Herman reaches for this, pinching the ringlet between a thumb and index finger before brushing the wetness across her chewed bottom lip. 

Kate hardly reacts, instead opting to bore her eyes into his in such a way that he stills all movements in a split second.

“Do you really?” Her voice is hoarse and it spreads an eruption of shivers down his spine. She reaches up to trace the line of stubble on his cheek, her expression kind but not lacking a certain strength that captivates him into utter silence. “Or do you see someone else, Manny?”

Herman blinks at her, barely feeling her icy fingers that soothe along his features with chaste care. 

“I… Don’t know…”

“Yes, you do, Manny.” When she is not sneering filthy insults and secrets, her voice has her father’s faint, intelligent lilt. It’s beautiful that she allows Herman to hear, the very thought making his eyes sting and cloud with unfallen tears. “Do I truly frighten you?”

He nods, letting his head fall back onto the mattress limply as his heart goes numb. “I don’t think I can… tell you. You already know.”

“I do.” She whispers, kissing at the tears that finally do fall, smoothing his hair back from his sweaty forehead in slow, lingering glides. “I need to hear it, though.”  
So he tells her of Ellen DeLoria’s smile, and how it broke his heart. Ellen’s swollen belly, and how Herman broke her heart because of it. A troubled son without a father, Butch DeLoria—a steady gossip topic for nineteen years. 

_I’m, um, with Pepper now._

_**What?** But… **No** , I don’t understand what the hell you’re **talkin’** about, what about **our** kid? **This** fucking kid!_

_I’m sorry I—… I just…_

_…You’re such a fucker Herman, I can’t believe it sometimes._

_I know._

_You **know**?_

_Yeah._

_What about **me**? Hm? You think about me? And what about this kid, huh? What am I gonna tell my son— **your fucking son** —when he asks: ‘Where’s Daddy?’ What about it, Manny, tell me!_

_…_

_I… I just can’t do it by myself Manny, please. You just… You gotta stay with me, stay with **us**. Please, Manny, you **gotta** do it. _

_Just… tell him I’m dead._

_Can’t you love us? I **know** you could, Manny, just try for **Butch**. I’m—…I’m too scared to do this, I really am. I’m just a kid, Manny, come on!_

_…_

_Fine. **Fine!** You know what? Why don’t you give Pepper a **big kiss** for me, eh Manny?_

 

“I was too young—I… didn’t realize he’d be my son, not at the time. Pep was pregnant with Freddie too and…” He chokes on his hysteria, nearly suffocates from the panic of it all. Herman is thankful that Kate is no longer coddling him. She just stares at him blankly—unpitying and unjudging, for she must know that she is just as bad as he is.

Or maybe she isn’t. 

“Butch is yours.” She states in monotone, unquestioning. 

“He’s _**Ellen’s**_.” He seethes hotly, grinding the heels of his palms into his streaming eyes, raking fingers through his wild hair and scraping dull nails against his scalp. “Not mine, not if I didn’t love him.”

“You love her, though.”

“Yes.” He gasps, nodding frantically, ripping at his hair. “Sometimes I look at… at him and I see me and her in his eyes and his face and I just _hate_ him so much. He is such a _bad_ kid.”

“He’s _hurt_ you stupid bastard, you _fuck up_. Butch is a prick because his father couldn’t give a shit about him and his mom with his hands full of proper, _sober_ pussy.” She lashes out so suddenly, so forcefully that Herman chokes on a sob and splutters into silence. A bewildering emotion burns steady in her eyes, wild and dangerous, enough to make him flatten against the wall behind him. “You’re a fucking Grade-A cunt, you know that?”

“Stop it, Kate.” His voice cracks in misery, eyes watching her as she crawls out from under the haven of machinery to pull her jumpsuit up properly. Herman follows her, grabbing at her arm and yanking her back bodily by her shoulder. It hurts her, he can tell by her hiss and wince, but he can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t stop. “You don’t know what it was like for me to do that. I love Pepper, more than anything, and I love Freddie—,”

“And me, _and_ Ellen, and you hate Butch. Got it.” She leers, staring at him unmoving for a moment before slapping him so hard that her nails leave welts along his cheek. Fresh tears burn at the wounds. “Gotta split, Manny. Left the oven on, left the fridge open, forgot to feed my cat—all that.”

 

Kate sighs, glancing to the clock on the wall behind her as her door buzzer yelps. 

_Late—40 minutes late, that asshat_.

She flips her logbook closed, smearing the ink on her latest entry on the Holden family’s air-unit before she tosses the journal onto her bed. 

She lets the jukebox continue its singing, if only to distract from the smell of vodka on her breath. He hates it when she drinks, even if he’s no better. Typical. 

It isn’t long before she lets him in, his blue eyes cool in their observation of her as he leans casually against the doorframe, his face as feral and handsome as ever with that dirty sneer tugging faintly at his upper lip. He’s got a new scar, just below his lower lip. 

She realizes that she hasn’t seen him in a while, not like this.

“Kat.” Butch narrows his eyes, staring down at her through the smoke rings that float up towards him from her rounded lips. “You got ink on you.”

He wipes at it before she can, wetting his thumb with his tongue before jabbing it at her jaw clumsily. Kate whines audibly and lashes out at him—he laughs at her, brushing roughly past her and into her apartment with his usual misguided swagger. 

“Doesn’t daddy-dearest hate it when you get ashes on the carpets, Poindexter?” He mocks over his shoulder after flicking at Kate’s grinning face in a picture frame, the nail hitting the glass making a dull ding that sets Kate on end. 

“Good thing Daddy lives down the block, eh Butchie?” Kate whispers from behind him, nearly kneeing him in the groin when he refused to acknowledge her presence. The fucking dope. “Why were you late?”

“Huh? Oh, I was finger-blastin’ Christie during movie night.” Right on cue, he lifts his index and middle finger to Kate’s nose. “Gone with the Wind,” He says in explanation, seeing her raised brow. “She got _hot_.”

“Mm.” Kate nods, eyes narrowed, not bothering to tell Butch that his fingers smelt like anything but pussy. “She your date?”

Butch grins, reaching up his other hand to tuck back an unwashed lock of hair behind Kate’s ear, letting his knuckles skim down a hickey on her neck. He taps at it with his finger. “Only ‘cause I’m not yours.”

“About that…” Kate drawls, smacking Butch’s caress away. “ _Officer Gomez_ told me something rather… _scandalous_. Would you like to hear it?”

Butch’s face falls, humor and flirtation dissipated in place of discomfort. He watches her—studies her, really—for any trace of falsehood. Of course, Butch never _could_ tell with Kat, but he can’t help it; she’s had him on the edge of his seat since they were kids.

Kate’s got that damn look in her eye, like she’s got him cornered and he can’t do a fuckin’ thing about it. He almost regrets asking her for this favor, for use of her charm to investigate something he never had the guts to.

And now Katie’s licking at her lips, closing the distance between them with a sway of her hips and a purr that sends his thoughts dizzying out of grip.

She looks up at him thoughtfully, deeply—freezing him to the spot with _that fuckin’ smile_ —and a flash of something frightening brightens her eyes with mirth; just as if she had a beautiful, disgusting thought. “Fuck me, first.”

Butch narrows his eyes at the sudden suggestion, staying very still as she intertwines her strong little hand in his affectionately—he can still feel the bite of her nails on the back of his hand, however. 

Damn it, she knows him—knows this makes him burn and hate her, makes him love her more with each passing second. 

Kate melts in shivers and sighs when he presses his lips to the hickey staining her neck, then laughing callously as he yanks her head back with a handful of her hair before smashing a kiss into her mouth.

* * *

She doesn’t even see him.

She just ducked under Andy’s metal arm, eyes darting about the clinic in frantic, very open confusion before jogging past Stanley and into her father’s office. 

Herman swallows, nodding pointedly to Stanley, before making a move to follow her. 

Stanley is at his side in a split second. “Hey, Herman, she’s a good kid… You don’t need to… well, you know—,”

“I know.” Herman sighs, holstering his pistol to reassure the promise in his eyes. “I know, Stanley. I have to talk to her, though; tell her what I know at least.”

He shuts the blinds upon entering the office, entering the keycode and locking the door in nervous, fumbling movements before he turns. 

Kate is flying about the room, overturning filing cabinets, drawers, and boxes, glancing at sheets of paper briefly with flying eyes before crumpling it and throwing it over her shoulder. She stuffs various things into her backpack every once and a while: a framed biblical quote, a bobble head, a couple pencils and medical journals—things that seem silly and useless to Herman in a moment like now, but he doesn’t stop her.

“Katie.” Herman croaks, exhausted and anxious; disgusted with himself, mostly. The smell of blood is still heavy in his lungs. “Katie, come on.”

She looks wild as she jumps about the room, eyes wide and constantly searching, and Herman notices for the first time that she has blood splattered across her neck and face.

“Are you okay? Did… did anyone—?”

“I killed your buddy. John Kendall.” She says casually, finally turning to him as she stuffs a few Stims into the inner-breast pocket of her over-sized leather jacket. Herman blinks, opening his mouth stupidly before shutting it with a ripple of a shiver running down his spine. “He tried to, first, Manny. He wouldn’t leave me alone, even when I pointed my gun at him and—…” She stops, exhales, and forces a shrug. “Well, I don’t regret it.”

“Okay.” Herman takes a deep breath—tries to, more like. “Okay. Okay, Kate, you need to go. Now.”

“Fuck you, Manny, I know what you did.” She snarls, rushing forward in the blink of an eye to shove him roughly up against the door behind him. “Jonas was my friend. Eye for an eye, right? Ever hear of that, _huh_?”

“I didn’t—no Kate, _wait_ , I didn’t kill Jonas!” Herman knows she doesn’t _really_ care, not about Jonas or her friends or him; not about anyone but her father. He can see a feral glint in her eye, the same that shone in Stevie Mack’s right before he stomped Jonas’ face in. “I didn’t stop it, but I didn’t touch him. I ran—I—I…” 

“Huh. As per fucking usual, then.” She spits, still holding him up against the wall, her eyes searching his face in a quick flash. “You gonna arrest me?”

Herman holds his breath, staring down into the eyes that have terrorized him for nearly two years. She’s here, right now, and he could kill her—silence her and move on with his life. Pep would never know, and even if Freddie would hurt over her loss, Herman thinks that they could all move on. Her hurts would disappear.

Then again, she would probably die just as quickly _out there_. Herman winces at the thought.

“No.” He gasps, the answer releasing a tension in her that he notices almost immediately. “You know I can’t, Katie, not you.”

“Lucky me.” She grins, the expression more of an animalistic show of her teeth and the bloody color to them than a smile, and holsters her pistol in the pocket of her jacket. 

He hadn’t even noticed the barrel sticking into his stomach until it is gone.  
“You’re leaving.” Herman whispers, subtly blocking her way, and holding her gaze steadily when she looks up at him. “Following your dad?”

“Of course.” She scoffs, wiping the back of her nose on her sleeve. “I was getting a bit bored with this place anyway, you know? All my games are forfeit, now, and it’s a snore.”

“Games.” He repeats blankly. She nods.

“Sure. Yours was the most fun though, Manny dear.” She sneers, shrugging out of her jacket and yanking at the zipper of her suit until she’s standing in her under-things before him, looking entirely like a crazed, wild woman with her hair untamed with curls and a smear of blood on her collarbone. She smells like Radroach innards. “Took a while, though not as long as I expected—happily married man like you. Was a challenge still, and he always knew I _loved_ those.”

“Who?” Herman swallows when she pulls her ratty grey sports bra over her head. She looks up at him once she is bared before him, giving her chest a bit of a lewd shimmy in his direction before reaching down to touch herself. “Wh-…What the hell are you _doing_ , Kate?”

“I want you one last time.” She explains, breathless, and reaches up to smear her wetness across his lips. Herman almost begins to protest before she presses her long, warm body against his, her knuckles tapping at his armored cup pointedly. “It’ll be a shame to live without this cock, you know?”

He is silent for a moment, feeling a flash of anger seethe dully in his chest as she begins to remove his uniform with quick tugs and pulls—so different from her usual practiced movements that he knows, then, that she truly is quite frightened; she is human, after all. 

Herman wants this, too, if only for one last time. He knows it, but he also isn’t oblivious to Stanley’s presence outside this office. It’s been long enough already to arouse suspicion. And was it not likely that some Officers and vault citizens might make their way to the clinic in search of aid? 

But then she is whispering filthy promises to him, the darkness of her tone and the hatred in his heart cooing and coaxing him into kissing her, into ripping and yanking at her hair, into gathering her thrumming body up into his arms and shoving her up against the office door. 

“ _Yes_.” She hisses once he sets his pace, her voice broken and jostled with his furious movements. 

Herman buries his face into her neck as he shoves his hips forcefully between her thighs—grinding, _forcing, **fucking**_ her into the cold metal with all the ferocity she has forced into his heart. He loves her and is so absolutely convinced of this that he tells her, over and over as he plows into her. 

She laughs at him, kisses his hairline, and gives a little finger wave at the security camera over his shoulder. 

He doesn’t care, couldn’t care less, for there is a seething, raging heat in his groin and he can’t hear, think, or breathe until he is riding high on it. Kate knows this, knows to spur him on with her dirty words and pleads. She squeezes him, internally and with her thighs tight around his hips, bucking as best she can into his thrusts from between his over-bearing body and the door behind her.

“I’ll think of you.” He promises with a lick of his tongue over her nipple before he sucks her breast in his mouth. 

He knows she loves it, she told him so a week after the first time he fucked her—so he doesn’t stop, not even when he can feel his orgasm tugging at the back of his spine. “Get on your knees.”

“No!” She hisses, urgently enough for him to slide his lips from her swollen breast to look up into her eyes in question. Kate reaches around him to grab at his ass, forcing his hips flush against her. “I want it inside me, Manny.”  
The command makes him shiver, forces him to struggle to hold himself back as his breath begins to burn in his lungs from the exertion. “Wha—no, Kate, no, I can’t—,”

“Do it, you fucker.” She growls, intentionally tightening herself around him in a maddening push and suck of muscles that has him gasping and fumbling blindly against her. 

So he does, letting out a rasping grunt of a cry as he jerks and throbs inside of her, trembling from the aftermath of it. 

Herman has a brief moment of horrific realization before she is snaking out from his grip, his fear whispering ominously in the back of his skull as her chuckle rings out in the room.

Kate makes a sympathetic noise in the back of her throat upon seeing Herman’s catatonic expression, giving his jaw a little slap of affection before attending to his armor. 

“I wanted a little piece of you out there.” She taunts in a soft, lilting voice. Herman jerks his head to face her, frantically searching her eyes for jest. “Maybe he’ll be pretty like you and your boys.”

His reaction to strike her is a second late as she dances out of his reach to type in the keycode. “You’re joking, Kate.”

“ _You_ popped off in _me_ , Manny.” She shrugs, tapping at her lower abdomen with a disgusting sort of leer. “Don’t you know anything about the birds and bee—,”

She is choking under his grip in the next moment, her large eyes seeming to nearly pop out of their sockets as she gasps and thrashes against him in a panic. 

It is for the first time that Herman sees a real fear in Kate’s eyes.

“You never wanted me, did you? This was for Butch. Or maybe for Ellen?” He realizes aloud, squeezing her throat in his grip as he studies her purpling face thoughtfully. “You’re trying to drive me insane, aren’t you? Was that the deal?”

Any possible confession on her part is interrupted by the office door giving way from behind Kate, the sudden throw of her weight wrenching her neck from his grip as she falls to the floor besides Stanley’s feet. 

“Officer?” Stanley questions warily, staring down at Kate as she coughs and gasps on the floor before looking up to Herman’s mussed hair and bitten lips. “What—?”

“I’m fine.” Kate croaks as Stanley helps her to her feet, nodding briefly to Stanley before cutting her eyes dangerously to Herman. “Just a misunderstanding, right Manny?”

Herman can feel Stanley’s gaze boring into him as his eyes flicker between the two of them, obviously piecing together some kind of precarious relation between the Officer and the Doc’s kid. 

Before he can react, Kate is closing the gap between them, pressing her lips to Herman’s in a kiss equal parts forceful and possessive. He can faintly hear Stanley gasp in surprise, but by then Herman’s vision is tunneled to only see Kate before him, her darkly heated eyes flickering between his own as she pulls away.

“You drove yourself to this.” She answers him finally, with a smile dripping venom, and somehow it all clicks together in Herman’s whirring thoughts; suddenly, he hates her all over again. 

Kate runs her fingers through his untidy hair, almost affectionately, and that characteristic sparkle of cruelty shines true in her wild eyes as she gives him a knowing wink. 

Her loud cackle—towering over the whining alarms in its unbridled echoes—is the last thing Herman hears of her as her back disappears behind the closing clinic door.


	2. Missed Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sequel to Criminal. 
> 
> Trouble on the Homefront according to Kate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This sequel is pretty dark, just as a forewarning. It contains rape. 
> 
> It's primarily about the development and backstory of Kate as a character, as she is both my Lone Wanderer and my Courier. Also I was going through some shit at the time of writing this and it actually served as a phenomenal outlet for emotions.

He doesn’t recognize her—not even remotely, at first. 

At first, she is a dirty, skinny, dead-eyed creature whose hair is shorn and dull in color, whose large eyes make her look harsh and wild. 

Kate does not look joyful and vibrant, but blank and utterly barren of the vibrant happiness she once emanated—she is alert, like a feral animal thrust into a foreign territory. Herman has never been more unnerved by a sight in his entire life. 

“…Kate?” Herman looks her over once more, unbelieving of her presence after so long—a year, maybe two?—and hovers his hand over his pistol.

Kate blinks at the sight of him, apparently equally as bewildered by the sight of him, and her hand drops limply from the large rifle adorning her back; Herman has the faint thought that the gun seems to make her hunch, as if the weight of it has bent her small body forcibly. 

“Kate?—well… _Gosh_! I can hardly believe it! Is that really _you_?” He laughs, nearly hysterical from the suffocating air that she radiates, and continues to stare expectantly into those foreign eyes. No spite, no hidden laughter, no dark secrets, no confidence. Just… nothing.

“Kate?” Herman repeats, quietly now, for he can see the recognition flickering weakly in her eyes. He notices many ghastly scars as they stand there staring at one another, even with her baggy and largely concealing… armor? Clothing? He can’t quite tell. He thinks to a time when she was spotless.

“Manny.” She finally chokes out, the sound of her voice bringing a sharp pang to his heart—it is a voice he has strained to remember for over a year. Though, like the rest of her, the sound is small and wary. 

It doesn’t take long until she is crossing the large space that has built between them. The wild touch to her eyes worries him, makes him back up a step or two, but his fear is unfounded in the end. Kate collapses into him in a fury of tears and dusty fabric, wrapping her arms around him with a desperation that steals his breath away. 

She _feels_ different, no longer soft and exciting and blissful. Kate is hard with muscle and bone, smells of unwashed human and death and dirt, and her body no longer fills his arms—which eventually wrap around her in return—like she once did. 

Her sobs are so frantic in their nature that it isn’t long before she cannot breathe, that she begins to choke and claw at him in the need for aid. 

An old supposedly dead part of him is roused, forcing him into action as he scoops her up—somewhat awkwardly around the uncomfortable jabs of weapons—and shuffles her quickly into the entrance area. It is there that she breathes, gulping down air and letting the strong breeze from the outside dry her eyes. 

He watches her during these few minutes, brow drawn in confusion, hand gripping hers tightly as he tucks a strand of hair from her dirty face awkwardly. 

_Who is this_?

“Shit.” Her voice breaks and it makes Herman wince. “Sorry. I just…”

She takes a deep, frustrated breath through her nose, wiping at the runniness before turning to him. Kate smiles, kindly and sincerely, and he blinks in shock at the sight of it. “I just can’t believe that I’m seeing you… That you’re the _same_.”

He doesn’t speak, simply watches her watch him, and nearly begins to cry right along with her when he realizes that the Kate sitting beside him is not the same that left him broken all those months ago. How could he even begin to be angry when this creature is merely a ghost of what once existed in that horrible girl?

“What happened out there?” Is what Herman finally whispers. 

After a moment of her hiding her face in her hands, she exhales shakily and looks off to the bright light flooding in from the entrance. “Dad’s gone.”

She is suddenly a child, he realizes: nose red and running, eyes beautiful and large with the shine of tears, lips deeply flushed and puffy from fighting against the sobs that wrack her ribs. 

“I just—… I _just_ got him back, Manny.” Kate chokes on her words, battered agony radiating sickly behind her eyes. “All that time, looking and failing… All those people I—…” She pauses, swallowing audibly, and pushes her clenched fists against eyes. “He left me again...”

Herman’s heart drops from the sudden realization of what she speaks of, closing his eyes to erase the image of a motionless, paled James from his mind.

“Honey…” He can’t think of anything to say, doesn’t want to hear of any more tales of her scars or nightmares. “I’m sorry. I really am, Katie.”

Kate blinks a gathering of tears from her eyes, smearing at the grime coating her face, and looks to him underneath thin, wet lashes. She sniffs loudly, uncaring, and reaches a calloused hand up to his face.

He flinches away at the sight of dirt underneath her nails, though one look from her reddened, pitiable eyes makes his heart sore enough to bypass obsessive compulsions. 

“You’re so clean.” She muses, almost as if to herself, and smiles in wonder as she meets his eyes. “You’re so handsome, Manny. It’s wonderful to see a face like yours, after all this.”

Her sudden change in mood is off-putting, enough to make him forget that she ever left—however momentarily that bittersweet feeling is; he feels as if this is another tryst, with her cackles still laced with malice and her sparkling eyes haunting him in their absence of pity.

He doesn’t trust her, he decides—not in the slightest.

Herman lets her explore him after so long; innocent, chaste touches and observations that make _him_ feel like the outsider—though he supposes that if the people out there dress and look anything like Kate, then he _must_ look strange after so long.

“What’re you doing here?” The question dawns on him after the initial shock begins to fade. 

Kate’s fingers pause in their gentle journey down his cheek, her eyes looking confusedly into his for a brief moment. “Amata. She asked for my help, said things were fucked.”

Herman’s brow rises. “I’ll… pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“I appreciate that.” She sighs, dropping her hands from his face to run them through her shortly cut hair as she rises to her feet. He sees, after 3 years of wondering, that her hair is curly. It is such a silly, juvenile thing to ponder that he smiles. “Can I ask you some questions, then?”

“About…” He swallows, looking quickly away from the raw show of trepidation in Kate’s eyes. So, she is anticipating _his_ questions... Good. “About the vault?”

“Yeah. Assuming, of course, that I can’t just shove my rifle up the Overseer’s ass without having a reason first.” She grimaces as she looks down at her shoes, tutting under her breath as she scuffs the large boots together to rid them of encrusted mud. “And… assuming you won’t arrest me?”

Herman smiles, though he doesn’t know why—the memories those words bring back just send his thoughts racing once more, make his ears burn in hot discomfort. 

Though he supposes _his_ questions will come once Kate’s… done what she will with this vault. She cannot come back; Herman knows that—he wouldn’t allow it even if the Overseer did. He can’t live with her again now that he remembers what it’s like to live without her constant shadow.

“I won’t, Kate, as long as you are… civil.” It’s a lame way to make such a compromise, for he has no doubt that Kate could do away with every single soul in this vault if she truly wanted, though that doesn’t seem to be the case so far. Herman finds himself thanking the higher powers that she has been divested of her evil temper—as boorish as that feels to do. “You have my word—,”

Her hand is on his elbow suddenly, though she does not roughly yank him back to her like he expects. Kate tugs on his arm, cautiously and patiently, until Herman faces her with a pounding heart. What he expected was a knife to his stomach or a bullet between the eyes, he expected that the disgusting, bloodthirsty baring of her teeth was to be the last thing he saw—certainly not the chaste kiss that Kate presses to his lips. Warm, soft, and lovely.

Kate pulls away after a moment of letting her lips linger affectionately against his, rocking back onto her heels with a small smile—an apologetic one, strangely enough. 

“Old habits.” She answered his taken aback look, her hand falling from his arm and back to her side limply. “Thank you.”

He nods sharply, unknowing of what she was thanking him for, and turns in a hasty about-face to lead her back to the vault.

* * *

_“I need a break”_ , is what Herman was informed of in a hushed whisper, and he had nodded dutifully. It was his responsibility to watch over Kate, to monitor her strange behavior for any cracks, and to show her around the halls she already knew by heart. 

Reunions, fractured and stiff, were had and fought through uncomfortably. It was immediately noticed that Kate was not _Kate_ , not truly anymore, and Herman wasn’t sure if anyone actually mourned that as much as he did. Perhaps Amata.

Amata _almost_ cried, the tears were certainly there and seen by Kate, but the two were no longer close like they once were. There was some sort of resentment between them, a fissure in their bond, and Herman had to swallow the tenderness down his throat to keep from getting too emotional over that fact. He’d watched them grow up together—never did he expect it to end so abruptly.

“Wow.” Kate chuckles breathlessly—maybe on the border of hysterical—at the state of the diner, gripping her hair in both hands and staring wide-eyed at the destruction. “Uh… _how_?”

“Rebels.” Herman mumbles, not bothering to watch the way Kate’s face falls at the sight of a ruined piece of childhood. It’s been an exhausting few hours. “They figured it would get our attention, you know…”

“Did it?”

“Sure.” He doesn’t really feel like talking to her, especially after almost seeing his son get shot only a few hours earlier, but he knows this will be the only real time to speak to her. Kate won’t be staying much longer; he could tell the moment he saw that spark of a plan in her eyes. “But what can we do, right?”

Kate wordlessly slides into a booth, not bothering to glance up when a mug of coffee is set in front of her. Herman knows she doesn’t drink coffee—or, she didn’t _before_ —but he figures it’s a sort of gesture of peace; he can’t imagine what she accepts as such out in the Wasteland. A white flag, maybe?

“Right.” She blinks, looking up from a cracked tile on the floor and noticing the coffee for the first time. Kate frowns in confusion, nodding to the cup. “I thought the vault’s supplies were—,”

“It’s from a powdered mix. I, um, keep ‘em in my pockets. Nothing fancy.” He shrugs, a bit sheepishly actually, and smiles upon her weak laugh. “You like coffee any better than you used to?”

She looks up into his eyes a bit amusedly at that little slip of information, mashing her lips together in thought before she takes a tentative sip of the mottled brown liquid. 

Kate scrunches her face up and gives a heavy swallow. “Not particularly.”

They laugh, and even though Herman finds her much prettier with that familiar glow of merriment in her face, he still finds himself missing her gargantuan noises and her dazzling confidence. _If only she were this grey three years ago_ —he would’ve never given her a second glance.

“Manny…” She sighs, drawing his attention and causing his smile to falter. Kate looks at him, truly stares at him like he is something very complex and challenging to stare at, and smiles thoughtfully. “You’ve got a warm heart. You really do.”

He laughs stupidly, embarrassed by her strange emotions and making a show of it, but she doesn’t stop staring at him. 

“After—… After everything I’ve done to you.” Her voice breaks and she presses her fist to her lips firmly, looking quickly away from him and back at the tiles on the floor. Herman watches, rendered frozen by the beautiful image of Kate _trying not to cry_. It is such a simple, common thing to see in a _regular_ human being that he thinks it’s idiotic of him to find her so fascinating in the most human things she does. He hated her twenty-four hours ago, wanted her dead. 

“You should’ve killed me.” She looks up fiercely, eyes shining with the threat of tears. “ _I_ would have killed me.”

Herman’s mouth bobs open with his inadequacy—he never knows how to console people—and he shakes his head earnestly, stupidly. “ _No_ , Katie, I would never—,”

“You have questions, Manny.” She dismisses him with a fussy flick of her hand whilst the other rubs at her eyebrow—Herman is once again lost in the previous tide of her quickly changing emotions and fumbles to keep up. “I do too. We should… get this over with.”

He narrows his gaze into hers, part of him longing to treat her similarly to how she once acted, to dance around questions and make her seethe and horrify herself with guilt. 

He’s the same old Herman in the end, though. There was a reason Kate was able to enrapture the Gomez family so easily, and it wasn’t all necessarily due to her charms. Weakness was a constant nag in that family, especially when crushed and pressured by a force like—well, like Kate once was. 

“About us, I guess?”

“Yes.” She answers, looking him steadily in the eye. “Have you told—?”

“Pepper. Only her.” He interrupts, unable to hold her gaze from the rush of the memories that suddenly plagued him. “She… had a hard time; thought that it was her fault, of course… She tried to kill hers—…” He feels a bit dizzy from that train of thought. “Well, she had a hard time, like I said.”

“I… see.” Kate nods slowly, exhaling and folding her legs underneath her. The faux-leather of the seat squeaks awkwardly. “What about you?”

Herman makes a face, something of a bitter frown, and searches her eyes for a moment before shrugging.  
“I had a tough time too, Kate. I… have had a hard time forgiving you.” He doesn’t dare look at her, even in trying to stand up to her in a vulnerable time—she will always frighten him deeply. “You made me insane, thinking about… you out there—about our last time together. Pepper thinks you have my kid out there, you know, and she doesn’t even hate you for it!”

“It was a joke—,”

“No, it wasn’t a _joke_ , Kate!” He does look to her now, lets her see how much she’s tore at him, how the wounds that she left him with have festered and rotted to the root. It is Kate who struggles to keep his eyes now, and it spurs him. “You’ve ruined me, you’ve ruined my marriage, everything! You can’t just… you just…—”

“You ruined _yourself_!” In a split second she is there— _almost_. There is that burning, _terrifying_ hate in her eyes, that juvenile burst of emotion that locks his heart in its grasp and makes him panic. _Please, not this. Not **her**_. “ _You_ could’ve walked away from me, end of fucking story. But you were weak-willed, Manny; you were with Ellen, you were with Pepper, and then you were with me!”

“Sure, that’s right, but you know what Kate?” His voice is seething through his teeth, firing her up that much more. “You had a moment—you _must’ve_ —when you thought about what you were doing. Where you realized that I’m a father and a husband; where you knew that I would go along with you because I was… Because—”

He sighs at the sight of new tears spilling over her lids, his anger flickering weakly at the sight of her attempts to hide her shame in the biting of her lip, the hard and rapid blinks of her eyes, the restless tapping of her large boots on the seat beneath her. 

Herman realizes that being upset with who this girl once was wouldn’t make him feel better about making this new human being cry. He didn’t _know_ her now, didn’t know if she still laughed like a maniac, didn’t know if she was still as flirtatious as she once was, didn’t know if she still liked her steaks bloody—or even when the last time she had a good meal was. She’s a kid, even more so now than when she was 18. His anger could heal without causing her more pain—right? He had to believe that. He had to.

“Sorry, honey,” He whispers, swallowing a few times to fight back the sudden urge to cry. Too much of that today for him to add to it. “I just… I guess it’s strange to see you like this. Brings back some memories, is all.”

After some time of silence, Herman sees her glance briefly to him from the corner of his eye. “I did have that moment. You’re right.”  
He frowns but refuses to look at her, refuses to lose his temper with this child again. Instead he stares at the intercom that blinks a frantic red, though still keeps his attention trained on the girl in the opposite booth.

“Butch asked me to do it a while after the G.O.A.T. He always really knew the truth, you know, but he wanted to know for absolute certain.” She begins, and Herman prepares for the washes of strange hatred that come over him when thoughts of Butch come about. “He said he wanted me to get close to you through Freddie, because… well, because we always knew that Freddie liked me.”

Herman breathes deeply through his nose, anger rattling his chest harder than he was prepared for at the thought of Kate’s deception to his son. He clenches his fists to keep from lashing out at her once more.

“It was easy. I didn’t care if it hurt you or Freddie.” She admits, picking at her shoelaces. “It was for Butch… so, I just… did it.”

Something clicks, after all this time, and he is surprised he can keep his composure. Herman looks to her then, thankful that she doesn’t bother to meet his gaze. “You love Butch, don’t you?”

Kate’s head snaps to meet his eyes in alarm, her blue eyes practically blurring in their rapid observation of his expression. “No, I—…” Her denial, the flash of emotion in her eyes, is enough for Herman. He turns away, his own eyes blurring the slightest in outrage as she sighs lamely. “…No.”

“Unbelievable.” He hisses, mostly to himself, but he can still hear a hitch of a sob break her even breathing. “I don’t know how you still manage to shock me.”

She whispers something so quietly he cannot hear it.

“What?” He snaps, impatient and exhausted by the sight of her.

Kate sniffs loudly, wiping at her eyes with the heels of her palms before she looks into his eyes with a stunning sort of sincerity. “I’m sorry.”

* * *

Kate is banished. 

…She keeps calm. 

She stares intensely at Amata, trying to burn away the resolution in her best friend’s eyes, but there is nothing for it. Amata swallows, a tear falling into the curve of her nostril and down over the arch of her lips, and she turns away to address her vault with a leader’s voice. 

Kate stares steadily at the back of her best friend’s head and can easily walk herself through the steps of un-holstering her pistol and aiming it at that beautiful brown head. She would pull the trigger and the new Overseer would be splattered on the wall.

Never with Amata; not with Amata or… Dad.

_She_ wouldn’t kill Amata. 

Kate draws her pistol and, in a quick movement, shoots Alphonse Almodovar in the head. The old Overseer splatters all over the new and the rebels erupt in chaos. 

Kate is at the door before they can reach her and she is locking the clinic before they can think to scream. After all this time, the key-codes are still on the tips of her fingers.

“This is it sweetcheeks!” Kate calls through the door, blinking at the blood that drips from her eyelashes. “My master plan!”

Amata screams at her through the door, begs Kate for the lives of their classmates and the rebels, all of whom punch and claw at the windows. Freddie is in there, pressing his hands against the glass and shouting Kate’s name repeatedly—it is lost in the cacophony of panic. 

“Daddy for a daddy, Amata.” Kate plants a kiss on Amata’s image through the window. “Like eye for an eye, eh? It’s only fair.” She gives Amata one last smile before sprinting down the hall and out of sight.

She thinks quickly, knowing Butch to be nearby but not exactly where—he wasn’t in the clinic with the others, Kate had made absolutely sure that he wouldn’t be before-hand, just in case. 

It doesn’t take long to find him, fortunately—he is attracted to the area by the faint sound of pounding that travels through the walls of the clinic and into the hall. He appears from around the corner, jogging with his Toothpick in hand. Such a good heart—kinder than Kate’s ever was.

He slides across the tiles in his haste, staring in wide-eyed puzzlement at the image of Kate stalking towards him. 

“Kat! What’s—,” He sees the blood on her face and clothes, see’s that spark back in her eye and _that fucking smile_ that freezes him in his tracks. “Katie, what’d you do?”

“Listen up, Butchie.” Kate barrels into him, all heat and frenzied breath as she presses his body back into the cold wall with her weight. He stiffens and bucks instinctually. Such a wild boy—Kate’s stronger, though, and holds him down. “I want you to leave the Vault _right now_ —,”

“Fuck you, Katie, why should I? Huh?” He seethes, ceasing his struggles to stare down at her. She reeks of blood and sweat and like _Kate_ -Kate, not Wasteland-Kate, not that little mouse that came scurrying in alongside Gomez. He knew she was faking that bullshit act! “Tell me what you did!”

“Shh… _Shh_ … Hey, hey, hey! Don’t _worry_...” Kate whispers with a smile, _**his** smile_ , and soothes her fingertips affectionately down his cheek, runs her nails along his jaw-line like he’s breakable. She kisses his chin, inhales the smell of him, and nuzzles him with the affection she struggled to show when they first reunited. “I _had_ to defend myself, didn’t I? That’s all it was, I promise.”

“Against who? What the _hell_ are you talkin’ about, Kat?” He’s panting now, feeding off of her adrenaline and the beautiful, overwhelming feeling of having _his_ girl back. She’s here, pushing him up against the halls again and heating him up like a furnace. “Where—… Where do you want me to go, huh? I don’t know shit about anything out there!”

She grins big and wild and licks at the red shine of her bloodied lips. 

“Wait for me in Megaton, Butchie. I’ll be there soon.” Kate opens up, shows him the truth in her words, and he breathes out a shaky exhale at the intensity of her. _God damn_. “Promise? You’ll wait for me, hm? Promise me. _Now_ , Butch.”

He barely has to think about it. “I promise, Kat.”

“Good boy.” Kate leans up and gives him the toe-curling kiss he’s been waiting for. _She’s really back_... “Keep going South-East. You can’t miss it.”

 

A quick glance or two at the map on her Pip-Boy for guidance and she’s at her destination—Overseer’s office. Kate wonders at the convenience of Mr. Almodovar’s _former_ lack of talent in choosing passwords for personal files as she accesses security footage. 

The screens before her buzz to life, crackling at the edges in poor quality, though it gets the job done well enough. 

She checks on Amata and the gang: still trying to break the windows. So Amata _doesn’t_ know the key-codes to the whole vault? Convenient. Lucky, more like—even luckier that poor Paulie wasn’t alive to spring them out. 

It isn’t hard to lock the residents into their respective homes from here; they will only be in there for a moment, anyway. Security lockdowns usually only last for about two hours—plenty of time to prepare for the big show. 

Kate watches Butch escape, just as she told him to, and he barely spares the vault another glance before he’s out of her viewing range— _into the wasteland, Butchie_. Perfect.

It’s only a few moments of isolating the intercom until Kate is privately addressing her partner in crime, her _cherry on top_. She watches his beautiful face turn up into the security camera behind him in alarm, can see the way he attempts to console his wife who beats on the doors in frenzied, wild panic. 

Kate grins.

* * *

_“Herman Gomez, please report to the Reactor level.”_

Kate’s teasing lilt echoes in his apartment, clashing chaotically with Pepper’s frantic pleas—pleas with Herman to let her out, with God to calm her heart, for Freddie to be safe.

Herman tears at his hair as he stares up into the focused lens of the security camera, feeling light-headed as the piercing wails of his wife needle through his ears. 

_“Repeat: Herman Gomez, fat cock extraordinaire, report to the Reactor level for a chat!”_

There is a mechanical click and a hiss as their apartment door opens, spilling Pepper into the empty hallway. Herman turns just in time to see Pepper fleeing, running through the halls, throwing herself bodily at the locked doors like a frightened animal. 

“Pepper!” Herman yells after her. She’s gone, cowering somewhere at the end of the dark hall. 

He doesn’t hesitate when the door beside him opens with an ominous creak of gears.

Herman follows the trail laid before him by Kate: doors unlocked magically and locked quickly behind him. He feels like a rat in her experiment, following the sound of her teasing commands, running down the tunnels that she pushes him through. 

She must be in the Overseer’s office, has to be, and Herman wonders if there would be any way to reach her, to end this. How could _he_ cheat _her_ , though—he knows that she is watching him, can see the camera’s following his every move. 

The next door that opens leads him into the Filter room, where Stanley’s dead body is sprawled across the floor. 

_“Draw your pistol, Officer!”_ Her delighted squeal sends his heart shuddering.

Herman whips around, heart aching from the panic, expecting her to be there with him. She isn’t, however—she’s still speaking to him through the intercom. 

He does as he’s told while moving slowly over towards Stanley, looking around the room cautiously before crouching to examine the bullet-hole gouging a grotesque, leaking hole where his eye once was. 

“God damn it…” Herman sighs, his pistol shaking audibly in his hands, and fights to calm his jumping heart. _Jesus, I can barely breathe_ …

…

But then… he can’t really… _think_.

Herman let’s himself relax into a sitting position, not caring that Stanley’s blood soaks into his vault-suit, simply reveling in the strangely lulling throb in his brain, in the overwhelming light-headedness that makes his eyes roll back into his head.

“Hey Manny.” Her whisper is warm and moist in his ear, her lips hot against his cheekbone. “How’re you doin’?”

“I… I feel… _ugh_.” He lets his head loll back against her thin shoulder, eyes fluttering shut at the feeling of her hand ghosting over his groin. “Ah… I can’t really… _concentrate_ …”

“I know, Mister, I know.” She makes her voice high and child-like, causing him to laugh a bit deliriously. “Why don’t you let me handcuff you to these bars, hm? That might make you feel better.”

“What? Oh… um…” Herman is dragged with some effort towards the railing that Kate speaks of. She is handcuffing him to it before he can answer. That’s...okay with him, actually. “Sure, Katie… I trust you.”

He smiles dreamily as she leans down to kiss him— _truly_ kiss him, with hungry lips and a warm tongue—with her hands sliding up the arms that are bound above his head. Katie hasn’t kissed him in a long time, not like this… He’s missed it, missed… her.

Kate pulls away, steps over his sprawled legs and wanders past him and out of sight.  
“Katie?” He whines, blinking at the bright light that blossoms in his eyes. He blinks again, harder, and looks down at his unzipped jumpsuit. _How_ …? 

Herman tries to sit up, yanking painfully at the handcuffs that bind his wrists. He is suddenly painfully aware of everything around him—despite the horrid, piercing ringing in his ears. “Kate!”

“Boy do I love that toy! It’s _mesmerizing_ , isn’t it?” She is standing beside him, the suddenness of the realization making him gasp in fright at the sight of her. “Never fails me, Manny, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Wh—…what?” How did she handcuff him? What… what toy? “What’d you do to me?”

Kate tsks under her breath before she moves to stand with each leg on either side of his hips, lowering herself until she is pressed flush against his groin. She frowns, looks down to where she is pressed tightly against his hips, and looks up into his largely dilated eyes.

“What? Getting a limper dick with the older you get?” She begins to rock down into him slowly and patiently, and though she is hot against him and her thighs are powerful around his hips, he begins to feel nauseous and itchy with panic. “Or is that my toy fucking with your reaction time?”

He knows what she will do to him, knows that she will force this upon him and that he cannot fight back—not with the strange, tingly dead weight in the back of his skull and his bound hands that begin to grow numb. 

“I thought… I thought you were different.” He presses his eyes closed tight and swallows heavily as she begins to pant above him, begins to grind herself earnestly down onto his pathetic, unwanted erection. _He does not want this_. 

_**He does not want this**_. 

“Oh _please_ ,” She whispers, pausing momentarily—mercifully—in her writhing to lean down over him, pressing kisses along his neck. Her voice rings out in a sing-song taunt. “ _You missed me_. Missed _this_.”

He bucks suddenly, violently, and brings one knee up in a jarring kick to her spine. This jolts her body forward, her breast-bone knocking hard into his nose and sending his head banging loudly against the metal barring behind him.

“Ow, _fuck_!” She growls through gnashed teeth, arching her back in an experimental stretch and wincing as she does so. Is that pain behind that grimace? Or surprise? He doubts she truly feels either, so heartless and disgusting she is. 

In a flash of hands too fast for him to comprehend, Kate’s choking him, squeezing his throat so strongly that he can hear little crackling pops in his eyes and temples. 

She leans down over him to whisper in his ear once more, voice disturbingly child-like. “You pull that again and I’ll break your legs, Mister.”

Herman feels as if his eyes will pop out of his skull from the intense power with which she strangles him, his fingers writhing and clawing at mid-air above his head as he nods—barely manages to, really.

In the time that it takes for Herman to nearly lose consciousness—her strength holding his head down to the ground, cheekbone grating into the metal floor—Kate has his penis out of his jumpsuit and her own baggy, ragged pants pushed down over her hips. 

“Only a semi for me, Manny?” She pouts as she lightens her grip around his neck, allowing him a gasp of air. “I thought you liked little girls like me, hm?”

Tears fall from Herman’s eyes, but he doesn’t think Kate notices—or, at least, she must assume it’s from the pain. Kate doesn’t deserve to know that he cries for her, cries over what she has done to him—what he got himself into in a moment of weakness years ago.  
It doesn’t seem to matter to her that all his terrified, panicked body can produce is a weak-willed erection; she begins to ride him painfully and overly fast, though the discomfort is thankfully lessened by her wetness.

He realizes, upon the feel of her around him once again, that she must be aroused by this—by the pain and terror she has incited in him. With the next gasp of breath she allows him he only manages to choke out a sob of horror. 

Kate begins to let out little sounds, the sounds he used to love—used to covet in the privacy of his mind; he manages to catch a small whisper of ‘ _you missed me_ ’ as she leans down to bite at his jugular. Though it is hissed against his skin like a childish accusation—something he was not meant to hear.

“Missed me! MISSED ME!” She suddenly screams in his face, livid and shaking with the intensity of the hate in her eyes. She releases his throat finally, watching him gasp and choke greedily on the air that rushes through his lungs. She leans down to snarl disgustedly in his ear. “ _This serves you right_ —for fucking _little girls_ …”

Herman can’t control his breathing, can’t calm down enough for the overwhelming, buzzing light-headedness to pass safely; he is spiraling into some sort of attack, he knows—maybe even a heart attack—but he cannot calm down! She is screaming and _screaming_ at him, slapping and scratching at his face with all the anger she’s hidden from him since returning. 

Is this because of Butch? Or maybe her father’s death? She cannot hate Herman so deeply that she would do this—can she?

His ejaculation springs up upon the both of them with no warning, though it is not something to be enjoyed or to derive a guilty euphoria from—it is something shriveled and defeated, something that sucks the life from his muscles and the lights from his eyes. He did not want it, _he did not_. 

_God, I **didn’t want** this_.

Kate pauses as her weak, monotonous orgasm flushes through her womb, disappointing after all the effort she had put into it—though the thickness of Manny still inside her manages to give her hips a cheap shiver. Her muscles begin to burn from her previous fervor.

Her limbs wilt as she settles; the sick, rotting fury in her chest begins to cool back down to an aching simmer. She leans down to catch her breath against Herman’s slow rising chest—he is out cold, she knows, but that doesn’t sting with dissatisfaction as much as she thought it would.

Kate’s taken what she deserved rightfully, and he won’t live to mourn over his loss, so she doesn’t require anything more from him.   
“You’ll miss me.” She nods to herself, smiling, before she lifts herself off of Herman’s penis with a wince and a sharp intake of breath. The burn of her tactless, violent fucking catches up with her—she doesn’t bother to wipe at the blood on her thighs as she manages to stand on trembling legs.

Just in time, too, for a heated, crackling explosion bursts to her right. A bit of metal splinters from a burst pipe and catches raggedly on her arm—despite her dodge. 

In a moment of something pesky and dangerous—perhaps sentimentality? Pity?—Kate pauses in her escape, grimacing against the blinding light of the next explosion that collapses the chamber beside the filter room. She looks down to Herman, mouth lying charmingly slack and his face, marred by her fingernails, facing up towards the weakening fluorescents.

She smiles down at him, kicking her boot at Herman’s limp right leg—the material of which has darkened to a deep, bloody maroon, maybe from a bit of metal that she dodged. Not fatal, she could tell from where she stood. _He still has a chance_.

It was a quick, thoughtless thing to unlock the cuffs around Manny’s wrists, even as the vital organs of the Vault— _her_ Vault—began to fail and die around her in bursts of sparks and shrill keens of collapsing metal foundations.

It was silly, too. Herman Gomez would die here: he wouldn’t leave his family to perish, no matter what the direness of the situation.

Didn’t matter now. Kate would survive this, but the Vault? They would not.

So Kate did not spare him a last, final glance as she turned from her Vault and fled in the wake of its destruction. She let Manny die there, let Amata and Freddie die there—Ellen, too. 

She did not look back for them, either. 

It was done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
